.- 



NANCY THE JOYOUS 



** OP CALIF. LIHUBY. las 4SOKUB8 




(d 




Nancy thejoyous 



By 
Edith Stow 



Frontispiece by James McCracken 

Decorations by 
Joseph Pierre Nuyttens 



The Reilly & Eritton Co. 
Chicago 






Copyright, 1914 

by 
The Reilly & Britton Co. 



NANCY THE JOYOUS 



2132878 



NANCY THE JOYOUS 




ANCY LYNN was not 

really so pretty as she 
had the reputation of 
being. But a subtle 
something in her, of 
which she was quite un- 
conscious, stirred the 
blood the way it responds 
to the first subtle touch 
of spring. Other girls have tendrils of wood- 
brown hair that stray down across their cheeks, 
but with Nancy you had to fight down an impulse 
to touch them wonderingly. Her eyes were that 
violet blue of twilight, when the insistent voice of 
adventure whispers softly to you from behind 
the hills. It was, most of all, this distant, mock- 
ing call in her eyes that set men struggling to 
unhamper their feet and follow her. It made 



8 Nancy the Joyous 

other girls seem too tryingly near to a man; in 
fact, around in his way. 

In his contemplative fashion, John Carter 
feasted on the sight of Nancy Lynn perched high 
on the arm of an old-fashioned mahogany sofa 
in order to catch the waning daylight on the book 
she was reading aloud. He was seated at the 
other end of the sofa listening dividedly. Mostly 
he was wondering how he had ever won the love 
of such a girl, or was planning ahead for the days 
that would give her to him. Meanwhile, Nancy 
read blithely on, tilting the sentences up at the 
end in a cheerful fashion of her own. 

The room about them was the staid village par- 
lor of an elderly spinster cousin with whom, for 
the time being, Nancy Lynn was living as a kind 
of companion. It had haircloth furniture and a 
Brussels carpet with large figures designed in the 
spirit of miniature formal gardens. The mahog- 
any center table was littered with a couple of 
books, a box of candy and a quantity of maga- 
zines, pamphlets and letters which Carter had 
brought with him from the afternoon mail. The 
books bore difficult technical titles concerning 
commercial and diplomatic conditions in the Far 



Nancy the Joyous 9 

East, for Carter was waiting an appointment to 
an under-secretaryship in the legation at Peking. 
The subject of which these two talked oftenest 
was the home-spot they were to build together. 
That it was to be far off on the other side of the 
world was unimportant to the girl. She had 
youth and health and her first taste of love. 
Therefore all other circumstances life offered 
her seemed both trivial and satisfactory. 

So Nancy from her high seat on the arm of 
the sofa read buoyantly on: 

* The Chinese are past masters in the culinary 
art, and the delicacies seen at a good Chinese 
table are fit for a repast of Lucullus. Bird 
nests, shark fins, deer sinews, bird tongues, fish 
brains, shrimp eggs and many other extraordi- 
nary dishes make up the everyday menu.' ' 

Nancy dropped the book into her lap. 

" How " she began emphatically. Then 
she caught sight of the abstracted expression 
with which Carter was enveloping her. 

" I don't believe you heard a word," she 
accused him. 

" Not much," in his candid way. 

She reread the paragraph. 



10 Nancy the Joyous 

" Do you really think, dear, you'll enjoy see- 
ing your wife eating a bird's nest? " 

Carter slipped along the sofa and gathered 
her hands into his. Apparently Nancy took no 
notice of this. 

" And won't you get nervous watching her 
balancing a fish's fin on a chopstick? " 

"I'll enjoy her " he began gently. 

But here she interrupted him. Nancy Lynn 
interrupted a man whenever she felt so inclined. 
This was one of the rare moments in which she 
gave expression to her tenderness. She laid her 
soft cheek down against his forehead. 

' To think," she whispered, " of going off 
with you into a fain r land of birds' nests and 
fishes' fins " 

He was sometimes vaguely worried by her 
fancies. 

" You must not expect too much, little girl. 
Life is life," he warned. 

" and temples and heathens and diplo- 
mats," she continued in the same level tone. 

Then, having been perverse as long as she 
cared to, she raised her cheek from where it 
rested and gazed into his face. 



Nancy the Joyous 11 

" Don't worry for fear I can't meet realities," 
she assured him. " You forget that most all my 
life I have been an orphan handed from relative 
to relative. The one main thing orphans have 
to learn is to be adaptable. They do it by seeing 
things just as they are and fitting themselves in. 
So don't worry about the birds' nests, dear." 

Then her underlip began to tremble. She 
glanced out the window. 

" Everything in my life has had to be whittled 
down so as to fit into someone else's rough 
edges," she said huskily; " and then I'd move 
on and have to whittle it down some more. 
Even my father and mother have had to change 
to suit what the people I happened to be with 
remembered of them." 

John Carter gathered her hands in his with a 
closer pressure. Nancy responded to his sym- 
pathy with a plucky readjustment of her mood. 

" The one thing I have had all for my own 
was David, because none of them had ever heard 
of him. They thought I made him up, but I 
didn't. David? No, of course you don't know. 
He is someone I can remember father and 
mother talking about. They used to say that 



12 Nancy the Joyous 

they would have him plan for me in case they 
were both taken. He was the fortress of my 
soul. When life grew too prickly for a very 
little person to bear alone, I'd swing on the gate 
and think of David. The winter I stayed with 
Cousin Sarah I remember threatening my doll 
to leave her behind when he came for me unless 
she'd say * God bless all the relatives ' at the 
end of her prayers. But she wouldn't. How 
could she God-bless a woman that sewed differ- 
ent sorts of buttons up the back of your pina- 
fore when she had enough of one kind saved 
away in her sewing basket? " 

He drew her down beside him into his arms. 

* You'll never again be lonesome, dear," he 
whispered. 

' Won't I ? " she whispered back, so slowly 
that it sounded like a doubt. " Won't I ? " 




F you have ever been in love 
you will understand that 
Carter succeeded in con- 
vincing Nancy Lynn that 
she would " never again 
be lonesome." When the 
outer door had closed 
behind him, she stood in 
the hall listening to his 
receding footsteps and smiling softly. The par- 
lor, when she crossed to it, seemed still to hold 
his presence. The littered table suggested him, 
the disordered sofa, the angle at which he had 
pushed a chair in passing. She felt his voice 
whispering to her from out the shadows and in 
the air of the room his arms seemed wrapped 
about her. The most precious part of girlhood is 
its dreams. She dropped into the chair he had so 
lately vacated, laid her arms along the edge of 
the table and her face down upon them, com- 
pletely enthralled by a sense of the present 
sweetness of living. 

13 



14 Nancy the Joyous 

It was half an hour before she raised her 
head. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes 
starry with happiness. She stretched her arms 
out across the table, rejoicing in a little easeful 
strain that ran along them. 

Her eyes caught sight of the staid row of 
elderly, joyless portraits looking down from 
Cousin Eliza's walls and she waved them a kiss 
from her fingers. 

" God bless all the relatives," she said out of 
the fullness of her happiness. 

Cousin Eliza's complaining voice called 
querulously from above. 

" Nancy, it does seem to me it's about time 
you were coming up to bed." 

" All right, cousin," she answered cheerfully. 
" As soon as I straighten this room." 

Nancy set the furniture back in prim lines, 
all the time pleasantly conscious, as though her 
heart hummed a little tune to itself, that it would 
not be long before she would have a home of her 
own. 

' You won't be there," she said decidedly to 
the portraits 

She straightened into its place on the sofa a 



Nancy the Joyous 15 

cushion covered with black haircloth and stuffed 
hard with curled hair. 

" There will be soft colors and rugs and bare 
floors," thought Nancy. 

Last of all she rearranged the mahogany cen- 
ter table, neatly stacking the magazines left for 
her to read and tossing into the wastebasket 
some worthless pamphlets and letters John 
Carter had left behind. She drew from the 
volume she had been reading aloud a letter that 
Carter had torn in two and thrust into it for a 
bookmark. Instead of tossing it at once into 
the basket, Nancy unfolded it. 

" Perhaps it is something I should save," she 
thought, glancing along the typewritten lines. 

Directly under the rough edge where it had 
been torn across were the words: 

" Your cousin, being summoned out of town 
when on the point of writing you, wished me to 
forward the following message at once, because 
he has your future very much at heart." 

" ' Because he has your future very much at 
heart,' " she reread. She bent upon the paper a 
grateful smile. " I have, too," she whispered 
softly; " so I think we'll be friends when we 



16 Nancy the Joyous 

meet. Perhaps I'll even hang your portrait on 
the wall." 

She bent to toss the paper into the waste- 
basket but some impulse prompted her to look 
again to see if this were really something that 
should be destroyed. 

" John didn't read it. He must have thought 
it a typewritten circular. I don't think he knew 
it was a letter." 

As she read further down the sheet the girl's 
face turned suddenly white. It was from some 
cousin through whose influence John Carter's 
appointment was to come. This cousin inti- 
mated that he suspected Carter of having 
become interested in some girl in Chatterton. 
Then it went on to warn him that while he had 
shown marked gifts for such work as he was 
being sent to, he had not yet proved his ability; 
it was still in the promise. The East just now, 
it said, is a land full of new opportunities ; there 
are careers in the making there; but in order to 
fit himself to its conditions the young, untried 
man must not go hampered. The government 
requires that its new men in the consular service 
in the East shall be unmarried and shall not 



Nancy the Joyous 17 

marry for four years. But the cousin insisted 
upon more than this. He demanded that Carter 
should refrain from binding himself with any 
ties which might later, in the sweep of new and 
wider opportunities, be found irksome. Carter 
would have to choose between " this girl " and 
his cousin's influence in getting the appointment 
to a secretaryship. ' Your cousin wishes me to 
assure you that he takes this stand because he 
has your future very much at heart." 

Nancy Lynn's flesh slowly stiffened to her 
bones as though it had frozen there. She slipped 
sideways into a chair and stretched out her 
hands, with the letter shaking in them, across the 
table. She read it and reread it. Her teeth 
began to chatter. Then suddenly she clenched 
her hands into two fierce little fists, crumpling 
the paper between them. 

" Because you have his future so much at 
heart ! " she panted. " If I had your heart here, 
I'd dance on it and I'd dig my heels in! " 

After which burst of passion she laid her head 
down on the table and sobbed huskily. But 
slowly her sobs quieted. She did not raise her 
head but thought and thought heartbrokenly 



18 Nancy the Joyous 

until her flesh shivered and a fine ache came into 
her wrists and ankles and between her shoul- 
ders. Carter must not lose his chance in life for 
her sake. It took her a long time to work it 
all out, because her mind fumbled so. There 
were lapses when she only thought stupidly how 
cold she was. 

At last Nancy Lynn must have fallen asleep, 
for she awoke with a start when the clammy 
morning twilight was creeping in at the windows. 
She was still cold, and the ache was still between 
her shoulders, but now she wanted passionately 
only what would be best for him. Now that 
anger and surprise had passed and she could 
reason clearly, she saw that she could not trust 
Carter to choose for himself; he would cling to 
her, of that she was certain. On her part it 
could not be mere passive giving up, but active 
renunciation. 

She drew a sheet of paper toward her to 
write to whom? The cousin? She did not 
even know his name. The secretary then. " I 
am the girl you wrote about to Mr. Carter. He 
did not read your letter. I got it by mistake 
fortunately." Then she offered to make a bar- 



Nancy the Joyous 19 

gain. She would give him up if in return they 
would promise that he should never know. " I 
would not spoil his career," she ended with a 
sigh that threatened to turn into a sob. 

" He has not read this letter and he must 
never learn of it," thought Nancy. " It would 
not do for him to grow to hate the man who can 
give him his chance in life." 

At the end she signed the single letter " N." 
' Then they can't answer it," she thought 
with a scornful sob. ' Think if they should try 
to thank me ! " 




FTER the mail box had 
irretrievably swallowed 
her letter, Nancy Lynn 
turned back up the 
street, nodding a white 
face to her neighbors. 
At home, her feet 
dragged so on the stairs 
that she could not have 
mounted to her bedroom had it not been for the 
assisting pull of her hand along the banister. In 
a kind of daze she removed the pretty dress she 
had put on for John Carter's call the afternoon 
before and hung it away. Then suddenly with 
a blind rush she crossed the room and threw 
herself face downward on the bed. Her body 
was shaken by sobs which she fought back by 
pressing her wrist against her lips. 

Human nature is made in layers that work 
largely independent of one another. Now and 
then some earnest man, like Savonarola, by the 

heat of a single purpose, fuses his whole nature 

20 



Nancy the Joyous 21 

and loses his sense of humor. Then, there 
are women whose emotionalism soaks into their 
upper crust of spirituality and their under crust 
of brains until they become like unpalatable, 
juice-sogged pies. But, God be thanked, there 
are in this fine old world innumerable men and 
women who live true to pattern. Such was 
Nancy Lynn. 

Time passed. At last from some hidden cor- 
ner within the girl spoke up a fresh, brave little 
voice. 

" All the same you've got to send him away," 
the voice said. " It was a straight bargain." 

Nancy did not respond. 

" You've got to do it," it said a little louder. 

Nancy stirred. 

" How are you going to do it? " it asked next. 

Nancy turned over and lay face upward, gaz- 
ing quietly at the ceiling. She had merely 
moved out of her emotions to another layer of 
her being where the brain functions. 

To be sure, she asked herself, how was she 
to do it? And to her surprise she found it was 
not such an easy thing as it had appeared the 
night before. 



22 Nancy the Joyous 

Suppose, for instance, that alone in the heart 
of a desert were you and a man who knew you 
loved him. Not an easy matter to jilt him! 
You might say that you had grown to care for 
someone else; but there would be no sign of 
another man along the sky-line. You might 
feign to be jealous; but of whom? Or you 
might quietly run away. Where could you go 
in the desert that he could not follow and find 
you, and having found you, what reason could 
you give? 

The hamlet of Chatterton was not, strictly 
speaking, a desert, being composed of flag pave- 
ments, slant-roofed wooden houses and a row 
of stores offering various kinds of merchandise. 
Notwithstanding, in some ways it closely enough 
resembled a desert for the parallelism to remain. 

A starving girl who pushed back food and 
accepted the state of starvation again, such was 
Nancy Lynn; for as we humans need food, we 
need love and a home wherein to shelter love. 
With one of the strange paradoxes of life, 
the thing that enabled Nancy to bear the first 
days of her renunciation was the fact that she 
could devise no plausible method of carrying 



Nancy the Joyous 23 

out her promise. She brought all of her ingenu- 
ity with which she was amply endowed 
to bear upon it. Sometimes she thought futilely 
until her head ached; and sometimes, pushed 
to the edge by her problem, she turned like an 
animal at bay and was amused by the difficulty 
of her situation. 

" It's as though Nancy Stark had been pre- 
vented from going to battle because she couldn't 
find her sunbonnet," she laughed with a catch 
in her voice. 

In this mood Nancy Lynn fled one morning 
from under Cousin Eliza's querulous exactions. 
The main street of the village merged into a 
rutty highway, muddy in spots where the 
branches arched above it and hard-baked where 
it lay under the open sun. It was bordered on 
each side with a tangle of coarse, dusty grass, 
but the air above it was pierced by bird calls and 
sweet with the breath of clover. The road passed 
tilled land and small, moderately comfortable, 
moderately tidy farmhouses. Here and there 
some back-lying field sent out to it a lane, bush 
bordered and cut by the infrequent wagon 
tracks into lush ribbons of green grass. Nancy 



24 Nancy the Joyous 

went a short distance into one of these lanes and 
sat down on a granite boulder lying half grass- 
embedded in an angle of the rail fence. 

The warm sunshine lay upon her hair and 
spread across her young shoulders like a tender 
arm laid over them. Its warmth began to send 
a sense of rest along her nerves. Her taut 
muscles relaxed in response. For the first time 
in many days she gave up passively, as a tired 
child does. 

The problematical aspect of her sacrifice had 
engrossed her for too many days and nights to 
be shaken off; but now instead of groping back 
and forth along the blank wall of an impossible 
situation, Nancy sat in the sunshine drawing 
caricatures of her problem. Suppose, for 
instance, that she should some day meet the 
Crusty Old Party who had rejected her. She 
devised for him a series of highly picturesque 
discomfitures, each one terminating in some 
triumph of her own over him. She even thought 
up bits of conversation to be used by her on 
these gratifying occasions. Nancy decided, 
since this person was enough of a man of posi- 
tion to keep a secretary, her only chance of meet- 



Nancy the Joyous 25 

ing him was through her great-aunt, Mrs. 
Amelia Crubb. This relative, whom Nancy had 
never so much as seen, was the wealthy member 
of the family, a childless woman who some 
twenty-five years before had introduced Nancy's 
pretty mother into society, with the idea of 
arranging for her a wealthy marriage. The 
plan worked pleasantly until the first Nancy fell 
in love with gentle, studious, impecunious, 
unpractical Herbert Lynn, and insisted on mar- 
rying him in defiance of her aunt's wishes. 
Thereupon Mrs. Crubb summarily dropped her 
offending niece. 

As Nancy sat in the sunshine, devising pleas- 
ant, triumphal situations, two gypsy women 
came towards her down the lane. One was an 
old woman with bent shoulders. The other held 
herself erect and carried on her arm a basket of 
laces and notions covered with a red bandanna 
handkerchief. 

The relaxation in the open sunshine had 
brought back the light to Nancy's face. She 
regarded the two gypsies calmly and in return 
the elder of the pair studied Nancy shrewdly 
out of the corner of her eye. After she had fully 



26 Nancy the Joyous 

passed, she turned and approached Nancy. 

" Would the pretty lady like to know her 
future?" she asked. 

Nancy turned her hands over in her lap and 
gazed down at the lines of her palms, wiggling 
her fingers over them tantalizingly. 

; ' There's nothing in the world she'd like so 
much," she replied in an even tone. 

" I'll tell you what you're going to do," per- 
sisted the gypsy woman. 

' You couldn't possibly," returned Nancy in 
the same even voice. " I haven't an idea myself 
what I'm going to do." 

The elder gypsy laughed ; the young one with 
the basket smiled. 

" Someone loves you," coaxed the fortune, 
teller, peering down into Nancy's palms. 

" Yes." 

" And you love someone." 

" I certainly do." 

" And I see a journey." 

" Oh, no, you don't. I'm not going." 

" Not for you for him," amended the 

gypsy. 

Just then, outside on the highway into which 



Nancy the Joyous 27 

this lane ran, sounded the rattle of an automo- 
bile. It stopped at one side of the entrance to 
the lane, so that it was hidden from view by a 
fringe of bushes, but the voices of its occupants 
could be plainly heard. 

" Man," called out a woman dictatorily. She 
was evidently speaking to someone walking 
along the road and the pause indicated that he 
had stopped in response to her salutation. 

" Is this the road to Chatterton? " 

" Yes." 

" Can you tell me where I can find Miss Annie 
Laird Lynn? " 

" Never heard of her." 

" Oh, yes you have," commanded the voice. 
"I'm summering over at the hotel in Fair View 
and I've come all this way to look her up. I'm 
her great-aunt. You have certainly heard of 
Miss Annie Lynn." 

" Never knew of any such person," responded 
the man with rustic finality; and continued on 
his way. 

Miss Annie Laird Lynn, hidden from this 
authoritative person by the bank of elderberry 
bushes, gasped in astonishment. 



28 Nancy the Joyous 

" That must be my Great-aunt Crubb," she 
cried, throwing out her hands. 

Nancy's grasp of the situation was both 
prompt and final. First, it was impossible for 
her to step out and make known her identity, 
accosting her unknown wealthy relative along 
a country road, like a rustic, with rumpled hair 
and dusty shoes. Loyalty to her dead father 
and mother forbade it, for this gentle pair had 
made Mrs. Crubb their one point of pride. At 
the same time it was equally impossible for 
Nancy to let slip an opportunity for studying at 
closer range this legendary person. 

She sprang to her feet. 

" Trade," she whispered hurriedly, thrusting 
into the basket of laces the silk scarf knotted 
around the sailor collar of her dress and taking 
in exchange the red handkerchief. Drawing her 
curls down in a tangle about her face, she bound 
the bright cotton square about them. The loos- 
ened neck of her dress fell open, showing her 
slender white throat. As a final touch she tucked 
up one side of her skirt under her belt, like a 
stage gypsy. 

" She'd never recognize me if she saw me 



Nancy the Joyous 29 

again," she cried, delighted at the adventure 
of it. 

She ran down the lane, beckoning to the 
others to follow. 

" Come on," she called to them. 

The auto stood at the side of the road. It 
was a clumsy old car kept to rent to summer 
boarders. To-day it was being run by a country 
boy of about fourteen, reduced by his present 
patron to a spiritless condition. Beside him, 
with one ungloved hand resting on the steering 
wheel, sat Mrs. Amelia Crubb. She was a large, 
solid woman, handsomely gowned with the quiet 
perfection of good taste. Had life placed her 
in narrow circumstances, she would probably 
have nagged. As it was, being wealthy and 
generous, she merely domineered. Managing 
the affairs of others was to her a kind of fountain 
of youth. Her large flat face was sallow, but it 
gleamed with the light of her keen, not unkind, 
gray eyes. 

Nancy, bent on mischief, advanced to the 
auto. 

' Would the pretty lady like to have her for- 
tune told? " she pleaded softly. 



30 Nancy the Joyous 

Her voice and manner were a delicious imita- 
tion of humble petitioning. 

" Is this the road to Chatterton? " demanded 
Mrs. Crubb. 

Nancy disregarded the question. She laid 
two slim hands on the car and raised to Mrs. 
Crubb a pair of pensive eyes. 

" I can tell the pretty lady what will happen," 
she pleaded. 

Mrs. Crubb was a woman of too much good 
sense to dress younger than her years ; but of all 
things, she most loved girlhood. Her interest 
was at once attracted. 

Standing on tiptoe, Nancy leaned over into 
the auto so that she could gaze on the hand laid 
on the wheel. 

" I see that someone loves you," she began. 

" Oh, pshaw! " laughed Mrs. Crubb. 

Nancy, herself, felt inward quivers of mirth; 
but she tilted her chin and gazed up reproach- 
fully. This brought her face close to Mrs. 
Crubb's ample shoulder. It was a witching face. 
Even framed in its tangle of disordered hair 
and bound with red cotton, it suggested a flower. 
But rarest and most compelling of all were the 



Nancy the Joyous 31 

girl's deep violet eyes with their lurking hint of 
mockery. Her coquetry was so spontaneous 
that it fell alike on men and women, on young 
and old. Mrs. Crubb had a moment's benefit 
of it. 

Nancy drew back so that she stood with the 
other women. Meanwhile the idea was occurring 
to her that if she could only induce her great- 
aunt to retrace the road she had taken, to a cer- 
tain crossway, and to come into Chatterton by 
a highway parallel to the one she was now on, 
she, herself, would have time to run home cross- 
lots, slip into a fresh dress and receive her 
august relative ceremoniously. This seemed to 
her a fit ending for the adventure. 

" It would even look well if I kept her wait- 
ing for a few minutes," she considered. 

" Were you going to Chatterton? " she ques- 
tioned. 

Mrs. Crubb replied that she was and asked if 
they could give her any directions how to find 
the young woman whom she wished fo meet. 

' You won't find Miss Lynn if you go this 
way," said Nancy with decision. " You'll have 
to go in by the other road if you get her." And 



32 Nancy the Joyous 

then she gave Mrs. Crubb directions for her cir- 
cuitous route. 

The conviction in Nancy's voice was evident 
and Mrs. Crubb acted on it without hesitation. 

As the boy climbed out to crank the auto Mrs. 
Crubb demanded, " Have you ever seen Miss 
Lynn?" 

" I've heard of her." 

" What have you heard? " 

Nancy lifted her eyes devoutly. 

" That she is gentle and pious and good." 

The auto began to move. 

" Humph," said Mrs. Crubb. 




N" the best of spirits Nancy 
bade good-bye to the 
gypsies and started out 
to reach the village 
speedily. While she 
crossed the road her 
hands searched for the 
knot of the handkerchief. 
Failing to find it, she ran 
on, still wearing the bright kerchief bound about 
her curls. 

In order to make a shortcut she followed the 
lane in which she had met the gypsies, until this 
opened into a grassy meadow. Across it she cut 
diagonally. This brought her to a worked corn- 
field where her haste was impeded by her feet 
sinking in the ploughed ground. But at last she 
reached the opposite highway at a point half- 
way up a long hillside. Here was a rail fence 
to climb. As Nancy laid her hands on its top 
rail she saw that they were grimy. She turned 
them over critically and found their palms 

33 



34 Nancy the Joyous 

traced with delicate brown lines gathered from 
similar fences. A downward glance showed 
that her shoes and stockings were spotted with 
mud. Obviously it was impossible for her to 
reach the village in time properly to freshen and 
gown herself to meet her relative. Nancy's 
hands gripped the top rail rebelliously. 

In a deep-seated way Nancy Lynn knew that 
she was not really so thoroughly disappointed. 
Already a bodily sense of relief ran through her 
sagging nerves and muscles because now they 
would not be forced through the little scene of 
vainglory which Nancy would certainly have 
enacted before Mrs. Crubb in loyal memory of 
her parents. But here was the last straw. The 
last straw is seldom either dignified or pertinent. 
She crossed the fence and stood irresolutely in 
the wayside grass. 

' Then why hurry so! Why do anything! " 
Nancy dropped down on a boulder and wrap- 
ping her arms about her knees, buried her face 
in them. With a fierce joy in the abandon of it, 
she held it up as a grudge between her and God 
that she had not been allowed to meet her great- 
aunt again. Throughout the past anxious week, 



Nancy the Joyous 35 

Nancy Lynn had known scarcely one selfish 
thought, but now selfishness claimed its own from 
her. 

" Good morning, Miss Nancy." The voices 
sounded just above her head. 

She looked up and saw two workingmen stand- 
ing in the road in front of her. 

" Good morning, Tom. Good morning, Mr. 
Martin." Half the people of the countryside 
were her friends. 

" You weren't planning to go back by way of 
the bridge, were you? " suggested one of the 
men, nodding towards a wooden structure that 
spanned a river below the hill; " because it isn't 
safe. It wouldn't hold up a child. It'd break 
through like a shavin'." 

He went on to explain that some of the 
stringers had rotted and had been removed in 
order to be replaced. 

" If you see anybody coming this way you'll 
warn 'em, please, miss." 

" But you have left some danger signal, 
haven't you? " 

The men looked guilty. 

' We're coming back directly," said one of 



36 Nancy the Joyous 

the pair. " We're just going up here to get the 
stringers. It takes the two of us to handle 'em." 

" We didn't have the makings of a danger 
sign. But nobody hardly ever comes this way," 
added the other. 

They plodded on, making as good speed as 
possible on the up-grade, their humble figures 
fitting into the quiet country landscape. Two 
facing hillsides sloped together. Through the 
narrow valley between them a little river flowed 
towards a hamlet whose rounded treetops were 
pricked through by a pair of church spires. 
Close at hand, the trees bordering the road filed 
majestically up the hillside on which Nancy sat. 
There had been a day when she and John Carter 
had ridden horseback beneath these same trees 
and the very ground had sung beneath their 
feet. Nancy buried her face again at the mem- 
ory of it. What was she to do with the empty 
years ahead? How was she to meet them? 
With what was she to fill them? Here was a 
selfishness so august that it quieted her. 

A rattling sound broke in on these thoughts. 
A big, clumsy old car came toiling over the crest 
of the hill. It was Mrs. Crubb again. 



Nancy the Joyous 37 

Mindful of the bridge, Nancy waved her hand 
and stepped out to the edge of the road. 

" You! " exclaimed Mrs. Crubb. 

" Yes." 

" How did you get here? " 

" I came crosslots." 

" Well, you can tell me. I say that we are 
not on the right road." 

" This isn't the way I told you to come," 
agreed Nancy. 

" There," said Mrs. Crubb to the boy. 

They had been having trouble with the car 
and altogether she was disgusted with her 
errand of hunting up an unknown relative with 
the mild reputation of being " gentle, pious and 
good." Now this gypsy girl 

But at that moment, under her gaudy, scar- 
let kerchief, the gypsy girl's face turned ashen. 
On the crest of the opposite hill, silhouetted 
against the pale sky, sprang up the figure of a 
horseman who sat his saddle with the ease and 
bearing of the riding schools. The clear-cut 
vision dropped from the sky-line and became a 
brown spot riding down towards the death-trap 
awaiting him at the bridge. 



38 Nancy the Joyous 

"Oh!" gasped Nancy huskily. "Oh! 
Quick! " she cried, turning to the occupants of 
the car. 

Her alarm was hieroglyphic but contagious. 
Thinking the danger theirs, the boy promptly 
jumped over one side of the car and Mrs. Crubb 
rolled out the other. There it stood, empty, in 
the road before Nancy. Into it Nancy leaped, 
her hand reaching for the brake. She slipped it 
and waited. " He's riding down to the bridge, 
the broken bridge!" she whispered dryly. 
Would the car never move! It began to roll 
under gravity; then she felt a tug beneath her 
and knew that she was on power. 

Down the opposite slope dashed the horse and 
man, both keenly alive with youth and energy, 
spinning out the road behind them with desper- 
ate steadiness. 

The heavy gypsy wagons which had passed 
that way in the morning had cut deep ruts in 
the highway. Following in these, the machine 
lurched from side to side. Nevertheless Nancy 
stood up, one hand on the steering gear, the 
other high above her head, waving the red 
kerchief. 



Nancy the Joyous 39 

"Back! Go back!" she shouted, trying to 
force her voice above the clatter of the car. 
There was no thought of self now. 

The man on horseback waved back a signal 
and doubled his speed. With a pricking sense of 
dizziness, Nancy knew that she could not make 
him hear could not warn him. He would ride 
onto the bridge and go down before her eyes. 

Then she saw the way. Amid all the quiver 
and rattle of the machine, with fear trem- 
bling in her fingers and chattering her teeth, her 
soul grew a lake of peace and resolution. She 
would make the bridge first and he would see 
her fall. Not even the bravest can look death 
in the face and not feel a pang of anguish; and 
Nancy Lynn was not one of the bravest. But 
with a steady pressure of the lips she answered 
the chill which ran through her. After all, what 
what was her life to his! She was only Nancy, 
with whom no one had ever been able to live. 

She sat down and threw the car into high 
speed. With a fresh spurt it bounded forward. 
The race was really on now, with death waiting 
at the goal as the prize. Aside from its violent 
pitching in the ruts, the car vibrated in every 



40 Nancy the Joyous 

part. It kept on gaining speed terrifically, but 
every minute was precious. She must make the 
bridge, she reckoned, at least twenty feet ahead 
of him. The trees were in front of her; with a 
single leap they stood alongside. The bushes 
were a blurred green ribbon. The current of air 
stifled her and blurred her eyesight. So she 
dashed down to the bridge that was to " break 
through like a shavin'." 

The car struck the planks with a leap and 
skidded, reaching midstream. There was a crash 
behind. The engines raced madly as the hind 
wheels hung over the splintered edge. There, for 
a flash of time the car wavered. Upright in it 
stood Nancy Lynn, her face glowing with vic- 
tory, one hand holding a flutter of red lifted high 
above her head. In the instant during which the 
car hung down, driven in like a peg between the 
broken sections of the bridge, Nancy seized the 
opportunity to throw herself over its side into 
the stream to escape being drawn under with the 
wreckage. With a great rending of timbers and 
splash of water, all went down together. 

The distant hamlet with its rounded treetops 
pricked through by a pair of church spires, 



Nancy the Joyous 41 

looked as if it had been cut out of paper and 
pasted against a wall. A flock of sparrows, 
drinking along the river, fluttered up to the 
bushes with a brief chorus of protests. But soon 
they dropped back to their drinking and bath- 
ing, for those drifting timbers, so they decided, 
would not harm them; neither would that occa- 
sional gleam of scarlet. 

By the time Mrs. Crubb, panting heavily, 
reached the foot of the hill, Nancy was on the 
bank held close in a pair of stalwart arms as 
though they would never again let her go. Her 
face was radiant with love. 

" I had to do it," she was answering him. " It 
was the only way to save you." 

Then she caught sight of Mrs. Crubb and drew 
herself up lithely beside him. 

" Aunt Crubb," she announced proudly, " this 
is a friend of mine, Mr. Carter." 

Then at that lady's look of amazement, Nancy 
gave a quick, soft laugh. 

" Oh, yes; and I'm Nancy Lynn." 

"You are!" gasped Mrs. Crubb. "Then 
you're a fool. He isn't worth it. No man living 
is." 



42 Nancy the Joyous 

But however brusque her tongue, her gray 
eyes gleamed with pride. She turned with 
delighted fierceness on the boy who stood gap- 
ing at her side. 

" It's worth the price of the car to know that 
one of my blood had it in her. Do you hear? 
You go home and tell your master that." 




HERE is a type of Ameri- 
can business man who 
works himself up to suc- 
cess because he has the 
virtues of aggressiveness 
and fineness of feeling. 
He is also nervous, sensi- 
tive, egotistic and na- 
tional. When one of 
these men is at the head of a business system, his 
personality permeates down through its parts, 
making it all aggressive and high-strung. 

There is still another type of eminently suc- 
cessful man who is both American and universal. 
His fundamental qualities are health, intelli- 
gence, honesty and industry. To these are added 
the virtues of imagination, courage, sense of jus- 
tice, the desire to serve his times and the ability 
to deduct judgment from experience. It is a 
list of high qualities and men of the type are 
rare. The combination, when it occurs, is gener- 
ally found in men of middle years. This is 

43 



44 Nancy the Joyous 

because men of this kind make a late meta- 
morphosis from their chrysalis state of earnest, 
thorough, intelligent young fellows with high 
personal ideals. 

The cousin whom Nancy Lynn had dubbed 
the Crusty Old Person, being versed in men and 
affairs, believed with deep-seated satisfaction 
that he discovered promise of such things in John 
Carter. As yet Carter was only the earnest, 
thorough, intelligent young fellow with high 
ideals. His friendships were mostly with older 
men. If he had had less foundation on which to 
build, John Carter would have been a plodder. 
As it was, he was what is called solid; a quality 
that the world admires yet somehow bewails in a 
young man. 

Some ten years or so ago America discovered 
the weakness of her consular system, especially 
in the Far East. To remedy this she established 
in Peking what might be called a consular col- 
lege. Picked men go there, receive instruction 
in diplomacy and are sent to various consular 
posts of the East. John Carter selected this as 
his field of endeavor and in his thorough way 
planned a university and graduate course to that 



Nancy the Joyous 45 

end. Then, instead of going on through the con- 
sular instruction at Peking, which is under the 
Civil Service, he was offered an under-secretary- 
ship in the Peking legation, which comes by 
appointment. When he concluded to adopt this 
change of plans, he selected Chatterton as a quiet, 
uninterrupting corner of the earth in which to 
work out certain statistics of the American mar- 
ket which he had been asked to tabulate in order 
to bring with him recent, definite information. 
In Chatterton fate lay in wait for him in the 
guise of Nancy Lynn. He maintained a high 
level of ideals as to the attitude of men towards 
women; but after he met Nancy Lynn these 
generalizations went to the four winds of 
heaven. When he thought of Nancy Lynn he 
thought of just Nancy Lynn. He was desper- 
ately in love. There are innumerable ways of 
being in love; probably just as many as there are 
different kinds of girls. In his case it was as 
though the well of life, which had always been 
monotonously thirst-quenching, had suddenly 
pumped up a single glass of sparkling cham- 
pagne. He found Nancy confusing but alto- 
gether adorable. 



46 Nancy the Joyous 

He did not suspect her of being the imme- 
diate cause of the variety of trivial circumstances 
that had arisen to prevent his seeing her during 
the two days that had passed since the incident 
at the bridge. When he lamented them over the 
telephone, so did Nancy. The thought of her 
wild down-hill ride to save him stirred him to the 
depths, yet that was now two days back and he 
had not succeeded in seeing her alone. 

At last fate favored him. But hungry as he 
was for the blue of her eyes and the touch of her 
lips, as he walked to her through the dusk along 
the village streets, he was inwardly repeating, 
" Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay 
down his life " 

The door of the house stood open to the sum- 
mer night. Nancy Lynn was moving restlessly 
about the mahogany and haircloth parlor when 
she caught the sound of Carter's quick, eager 
step. 

" Come in," she called blithely. 

The next minute his arms were about her and 
his lips bent to hers. But there's many a slip 
'twixt the cup and the lip, John Carter! Quick 
as a flash, Nancy, with her two palms laid against 



Nancy the Joyous 47 

his chest, had pushed herself away from him and 
had tilted up her face mockingly. 

" Good evening, Mr. Carter," she remarked 
leisurely in a delicious imitation of Mrs. Crubb's 
heavy voice. 

The husky tones, coming from Nancy's fresh 
lips, were ludicrous. He laughed outright in 
sheer surprise. She laughed, too; and slipped 
from him around the corner of the claw-legged 
mahogany table. When he started to follow, 
she reached out her hand to him across it. 

" Good evening, Mr. Carter," she repeated 
with bewitching drollery. Only, somehow, it 
was pathetic to find Nancy brought to mere 
repetitions. Suddenly she bent and laid her 
cheek on the back of her hand as it rested in his. 
Her eyelashes brushed his wrist. But the next 
minute she was ornamentally entertaining him 
with a rollicking account of the call she had that 
day paid Mrs. Crubb. 

' You certainly won her. She told me she had 
no idea there were such quite presentable country 
fellows in this back section of the state." 

Once more they laughed together. 

Nancy explained how she had taken the train 



48 Nancy the Joyous 

to the station nearest Fair View, where Mrs. 
Crubb was summering, and had there hired a 
conveyance to drive her over. 

" It was costly," she conceded in a lavish tone, 
" but it had to be done. For my mother's sake I 
had to show her that I understood the correct 
social courtesies. I sent up my card and she 
hurried right down. I think she was not yet con- 
vinced that I was not really a gypsy. She was 
afraid she might find me downstairs selling laces 
to her friends." 

Here Nancy's manner changed. 

" But I did manage to please her," she 
faltered. 

She drew a piece of typewritten paper from 
under a book and stood rolling it between the 
table and the palm of her hand. 

" I promised to go to the city and live with 
her." 

" Do you think that is wise, dear," he objected. 
" She impresses me as a most difficult person to 
live with." 

Without replying in words, Nancy raised to 
him a flushed face on which was written a set 
determination. 



Nancy the Joyous 49 

"Of course, a winter in New York would be a 
big experience," he conceded, " but I'm afraid it 
would end in trouble for you. I'd rather think 
of you, those years that I am away from you, as 
waiting safe and happy up here among these 
good village people." 

Still Nancy's only answer was the established 
purpose suggested by her whole lithe figure. 
Carter was vaguely troubled by it. 

" I'm only thinking of your happiness, my 
dear. You know your mother could not get along 
with her." 

" Yes, but Aunt Crubb may have mellowed 
since then." 

"Mellowed!" 

They looked into each other's eyes and burst 
out laughing together. 

" Oh, she might be worse," insisted Nancy, still 
laughing. 

" Yes. She might carry a bayonet." 

Then Carter waved the whole matter aside. 
There came into his voice the note of strength 
and tenderness that a big, clean man saves for the 
woman he loves. 

" We have plenty of time to decide that. I 



50 Nancy the Joyous 

want to talk about that day at the bridge. When 
I think of it " 

" No," interrupted Nancy steadily, " we 
haven't plenty of time. I'm to leave day after 
to-morrow." 

"Day after to-morrow! But I don't go for 
six weeks yet ! " 

Now that Nancy had made her opportunity, 
she persevered relentlessly. Womanlike, she 
began far off on the outer edge of the situation. 

" I'm sure I don't know why she wants me. 
There does not seem to be a thing about me that 
suits her. She said my dress was a fright but 
that she'd order me some new ones ; and my hair 
has no style, but she will have her maid do it." 

Nancy tried to smile at these sallies but the 
muscles of her face were stiff. 

" She says that she has not a doubt in the 
world that she can marry me to a million." 

" But you are going to marry me! " 

" No. No, I'm not. I've changed my mind. 
Aunt Crubb says I don't know the world. She 
says that every girl ought to see something of the 
world before she is in a position to decide." 

This was so unlike Nancy that try hard as 



Nancy the Joyous 51 

she might to speak naturally, she said the words 
in a tinkling, ineffectual tone that failed to con- 
vince Carter. He was perplexed and stern. 
Both of Nancy's palms were braced on the table 
now to steady herself. 

" Aunt Crubb promised to let me wear some 
of her diamonds," she persisted. 

Carter's voice was low, controlled and very 
patient. 

" Nancy, I know you too well. You can't 
make me believe it of you. Why, my dear, it 
would be nothing more nor less than selling your- 
self." 

She gulped and nodded her head. 

" Yes, I know it." 

"Nancy!" 

She began again rolling the typewritten paper 
under her ringers. 

" I asked her if I could wear silk stockings and 
she said yes. Just think, I've never owned " 

" This is no time for levity," he said sternly. 

" No," she agreed. She was so anxious to 
agree with him in all that she could. 

" Put that paper away," he commanded. 

She slipped it under a book. 



52 Nancy the Joyous 

" Thank you." Once more his voice was low, 
controlled and patient. " Now listen. I want 
you to follow me." 

There was a magnetism in his quiet intensity 
which held her eyes fixed on his. 

" If you think, Nancy, that you could do such 
a thing, I understand you better than you under- 
stand yourself. It is just a sudden, present 
temptation. Some day, when you are your bet- 
ter self again " 

" I haven't any better self," she answered with 
a little wry smile. 

His voice dropped a note lower. 

' Then I have more faith in you than you have 
in yourself. You think you mean this, but you 
don't." 

' Yes, I do mean it. I've promised not to 
marry you." 

" Promised! " he exclaimed. 

Nancy nodded her head. 

" I promised I'd have nothing more to do with 

you." 

Carter's words came quicker. His next remark 
was merely the leader for a line of argument. 
' You had given me your promise. You know 



Nancy the Joyous 53 

you had no right to make another while that 
holds." 

It was an excellent line of argument; but 
in a way thoroughly characteristic of her, 
Nancy's answer held a surprise which scattered 
it to the winds. An expression of conviction 
quivered across her face. Her eyes looked into 
his with absolute honesty in their purple depths. 

" That's so. I never thought of that," she 
said simply. 

His voice rose in pitch. The flesh of his face 
turned gray. 

" You never thought of it ! You mean that 
you made such a promise without even thinking 
that you were breaking your word to me? " 

" Yes," she answered with a truthfulness that 
could not be doubted. " I never once thought of 
it. If I had, of course I wouldn't have done it 
that way." 

" May I ask what you were thinking of? " he 
inquired with ironical courtesy. 

Nancy shuddered. She drew out the paper 
again for the support the sight of it gave her. 
Then, remembering that her fumbling had dis- 
pleased him, she slipped it back. 



54 Nancy the Joyous 

" I was just thinking about what I was buy- 
ing y about what I was buying." 

" And planning how to get me off your hands, 
I suppose." 

" No," she said truthfully, " I didn't think 
about that either. I didn't think about that until 
later. It's been harder than I thought it would 
be." 

Carter softened. It would be difficult for a 
man's heart not to soften toward her with that 
beautiful, honest, steadfast face before him. 

"Harder than you thought to give me up? 
That's because down in your heart " 

" No, that isn't what I mean. I mean that it 
was harder to find a way to " 

' Well, you have found one," he answered, 
recoiling with a bitter laugh. 

They both waited. The clock on the shelf 
ticked loudly. 

" So this is what love means to you," he began 
again scornfully. 

She flushed but made no answer. 

" And you are the girl I believed Shall I 
tell you what I was thinking about you as I came 
here to-night? I was saying to myself, ' Greater 



Nancy the Joyous 55 

love hath no man ' Oh! " he ended contemptu- 
ously. 

Nancy swayed towards him and whispered, 
" ' than this, that he lay down his life ' 
She spread her arms wide in a sudden appeal. 
" That's so. Greater love hath no man." She 
caught hold of the back of a chair and gave a 
heart-breaking laugh. 

" What do you know about it? " he said bit- 
terly. 

Nancy made no reply, pressing her lips 
together to keep them silent. She rubbed the 
back of her hand across her eyes as one with a 
headache does. When she looked again he was 
standing with his hand on the doorknob. At this, 
the purpose she had reared seemed all to crumble 
and fall within her. Her blue eyes grew wide 
with anguish. 

" Nancy, you don't mean this. Think once 
more." 

" Yes, I mean it." 

The knob turned in his hand with a click. She 
reached out her hands impulsively. 

" Say good-bye to me," sJie begged. 

A red surge of anger swept across his face. 



56 Nancy the Joyous 

" Good-bye. A man's lucky to be rid of you." 
" Oh, don't! Don't say that! " she cried out 
piteously. 
But the door had closed between them. 




RS. AMELIA CRUBB 

returned from a summer 
in the country, bringing 
Nancy Lynn with her. 

" I can't bear to get 
old," she announced in 
her hard, dry voice at the 
reception given to intro- 
duce her pretty relative, 
" so I brought the girl back with me for the sake 
of having the young set come to the house. They 
wouldn't do it to see an old woman like me. My 
elderly banter is too sage for them. Young fun 
is so frothy," she ended enviously. 

This remark was audible to Nancy, standing 
on the opposite side of the drawing room with a 
group of stalwart young men gathered about 
her. 

" So you see," she commented amusedly, " I'm 
merely a voice crying in the wilderness. You're 
the wilderness." 

To her friend, the Bishop, Mrs. Crubb dilated 

57 



58 Nancy the Joyous 

on the subject of her newly acquired guardian- 
ship even more intimately. 

" I had practically forgotten there was such 
a child," she remarked in the running tone 
of a showman. " She is my niece's daughter. 
Named after her, Annie Laird Lynn. You 
remember Annie? Why, yes, of course; you 
were around the summer she spent with me at 
the coast." 

Mrs. Crubb now focused on the subject remi- 
niscently. 

" It would have been a good deal better for 
Annie Laird if she had taken you," she said in 
her harsh way. " I told her so at the time. I 
used to say, ' Hubert may be nothing but a 
young minister but he isn't over-sanctified and 
he is the kind to make good in even a poor busi- 
ness.' But after she had once set her heart on 
Herbert Lynn there was no talking her out of it. 
A tramp's life he led her, too; always moving 
on from place to place with the wolf at their heels. 
I remember telling him once, ' If you haven't any 
consideration for Annie, do think of the wolf. 
It's getting hard on him.' I will say though," 
she added, with a touch of generosity for the 



Nancy the Joyous 59 

dead, " that to the end they both kept up the 
' loaf of bread, the jug of wine and thou beside 
me ' attitude." 

The Bishop's thoughts trailed backward with 
distaste over solitary years of ceremonious din- 
ners served him by the wives of church officials. 
Slightly as his face contracted at this vision of 
the loaf, the wine and the voice singing on the 
wilderness' edge, Mrs. Crubb detected it. 

" Oh, nobody minds what I say," she com- 
mented. " But to come back to Nancy," she 
continued briskly. She was a woman much more 
interested in the present than in the past. " I 
found her living with some of her father's people 
in a village near our hotel. There was only one 
eligible man in the place so far as I could learn. 
I told her, ' For goodness sakes, don't think you 
are in love with him. Wait until you see some 
of the rich young men I've picked out for you.' ' 

She folded her hands and smiled complacently 
over the vision of what she intended to do for 
her new protegee. Mrs. Crubb's complacency 
was the kind that argued ill for any difference 
of opinion on the part of her niece. At this par- 
ticular moment, however, that young lady's ideas 



60 Nancy the Joyous 

appeared to be entirely in harmony with her 
aunt's. 

The Bishop's eyes sorted over Nancy's beauty, 
making comparisons. Even where he noted dif- 
ferences from the Annie of other days, he con- 
ceded with a glow not unlike the pride of father- 
hood that the living girl was rarely beautiful. 

Mrs. Crubb followed the Bishop's gaze across 
the room. 

" Reminds one of her mother, doesn't she? 
The same zest for happiness, the same original- 
ity, and such an appreciation of the flesh-pots 
of Egypt. Half rations in the wilderness has 
worked her up an appetite." 

She threw up her heavy chin with a laugh. 

" Her first real tailor-made suit was sent up 
this morning. When she saw herself in it in the 
mirror she cried, ' Oh, Aunt, I didn't expect any- 
thing to fit like this till I got to Heaven and 
wore feathers ! ' 

Mrs. Crubb gave another short laugh. 

' You can't blame the young folks for clutch- 
ing at the good things of life," she chuckled 
condoningly. " What do they care about the 
kind of sentiment folks talked in my generation 



Nancy the Joyous 61 

and that was still popular in yours. Nowadays 
it's success that counts. It is all they hear about. 
Take Nancy, now. With her good looks she'll 
cut a path straight through to marrying a mil- 
lion. And I stand ready to back her in it." 

The Bishop was shocked by this open avowal 
of worldliness. He felt an aversion for this old 
woman who was more modern than the youngest 
person in her set. 

' You do the girl an injustice; you misinter- 
pret her nature." 

" And I'm not a fit old person to be entrusted 
with the keeping of the young," Mrs. Crubb 
chuckled. 

' This is merely a temporary phase with her, 
a first feeling of largess," he insisted. " She is 
her mother's daughter." 

" Also, she is my great-niece." 

The Bishop merely shrugged his shoulders at 
this indisputable fact. 

" And her father, if ineffective, was still a 
remarkably fine man," he argued. 

Instantly Mrs. Crubb changed into quite 
another woman and there leaped between them 
a feeling of old comradeship which kept them 



62 Nancy the Joyous 

friends in spite of what at times amounted almost 
to dislike. 

' You certainly have grown in grace, 
Hubert," she said. 

The man would rather not have put their 
friendship to the test of words. Nevertheless he 
replied, 

" The hand of the Lord is full of compensa- 
tions." 

; 'What was it in your case? A bishopric?" 
slipping back into her other self. 

He paused before he answered. " Well, for 
one thing, here's Nancy." 




S a voice crying in the 
wilderness, Nancy Lynn 
succeeded even beyond the 
exactions of her great- 
aunt. 

" I never knew a 
girl so popular," she 
boasted. "And she doesn't 
seem to try, either." 
For nearly two years now that is, ever 
since Nancy came to live at her great-aunt's 
the Bishop had dropped in almost daily. 
Out of these two people Nancy made for her- 
self a kind of family circle. She insisted, for 
instance, on the Bishop's taking a personal 
interest in her new gowns and her social 
triumphs; and he dotingly allowed himself to 
be dragged by her along the paths of 
her enthusiasms. 

" She is a lovable girl," he remarked during 
a visit when Nancy chanced to be absent. He 
missed her lyric presence in the house and was 

63 



64 Nancy the Joyous 

trying to fill the void he felt by talking of her. 

" She is a girl who wears her faults on the 
outside, exactly as though they were pieces of 
jewelry," answered Mrs. Crubb, with fine 
appreciation of faults. 

;< That has nothing to do with it. She is just 
lovable." 

"Oh, you men!" expostulated Mrs. Crubb. 
" See here, Hubert," she explained philosophic- 
ally, " if a girl chooses her faults with discre- 
tion it amounts to the same thing." 

' What is this I hear lately about Peyton 
Williams?" he questioned sternly. 

" Her latest," announced Mrs. Crubb with a 
triumphant wave of her hands. 

The Bishop had a vision of a bullet-headed 
American business man, wealthy beyond all 
reason. 

' You don't mean Nancy considers him 
seriously! " 

" I don't know anything about her plans. 
That is why I respect the girl. But I'm back- 
ing him." 

" She wouldn't think of marrying him. He is 
too old for her; and there is nothing in him to 



Nancy the Joyous 65 

answer the call of her spirit or call to hers." 

The poetry of this was beyond Mrs. Crubb. 

" I should not have said that he had it in him 
to fall in love, either," she said in a tone of 
agreeing. " But it seems he could not resist the 
sight of Nancy talking to the younger men. It 
will be a great triumph for her." 

" I am going to talk to her about it," said the 
Bishop severely. 

" So am I," chuckled Mrs. Crubb. 

But the Bishop never had an opportunity for 
his fatherly counsel, for only a week later whilet 
off on a diocesan visit, he read in his home paper 
the notice: 

Mrs. Amelia Crubb, at a reception held this after- 
noon, announced the engagement of her great-niece, 
Miss Annie Laird Lynn, to Mr. Peyton Weston 
Williams of this city. 

The newspaper dropped from the Bishop's 
hands. He removed his nose-glasses with delib- 
eration and with deliberation snapped them into 
their case. Then he sat looking off stupidly, 
while a wave of protest rose within him. Fi- 
nally, since he realized that he was helpless 



66 Nancy the Joyous 

against such a combination as Mrs. Crubb and 
Nancy, manlike he determined once for all to 
wash his hands of both ladies. But it is not 
such an easy matter, he found, for one to whom 
she had shown favor to flick Nancy Lynn off the 
surface of his thoughts. 

On his return it hurt him to discover her 
apparently without emotion in regard to her 
engagement. The matrons of her aunt's set said 
she was gaining poise. Everyone remarked on 
the wonderful physical endurance with which she 
was meeting a continued round of ante-nuptial 
functions. Later, the Bishop, practiced ana- 
lyzer of souls, detected a slight pressure of her 
lips when she was silent and by this he knew that 
she was keeping her mind concentrated on cer- 
tain financial facts of her engagement. Her 
fiance she favored with a sweeping, impersonal 
graciousness. 

No one but Nancy noticed that the Bishop 
absented himself almost entirely during this sea- 
son of complimentary functions; but even she 
did not realize how closely he was following them 
from a distance. " The pageantry of the sacri- 
fice," he called them. 



Nancy the Joyous 67 

It was like an Indian summer in the life of 
Mrs. Amelia Crubb. She was radiant and viva- 
cious concerning all this feting. Nancy always 
referred to the functions as though they were 
given in honor of her aunt. 

' They give Aunt Crubb a luncheon and a 
reception this afternoon and a dinner-dance to- 
night," she explained to the Bishop during a 
short, unsatisfactory call. 

The Bishop paid little heed to this remark. He 
was noticing that her face had grown thinner. 

' Yes, but being a society girl is hard work," 
she explained to him. " You see, the upper circle 
depends for its very existence on the number of 
social functions it gives. We would not dare 
stop, because if we did we would just cease to 
be; we would become the middle class again." 

A fine scorn ran through her words. 

" At first I enjoyed sitting in the ' horseshoe ' 
at the opera so much, but I soon discovered that 
to most of Aunt Crubb's set the music is a bore. 
And then I learned why we go to the opera. If 
we just maintained ourselves in complete and 
princely seclusion, the lower classes might forget 
that we were excluding them. Awful thought! 



68 Nancy the Joyous 

So we go and give them a demonstration of the 
fact to keep it before them." 

The natural democracy of the girl was rebel- 
ling after two years of being stifled and con- 
cealed. Save the Bishop, there was no one in 
her present life before whom she dared to be her 
full self. 

She brushed both hands across her eyes as 
though to clear their vision and then let them 
drop wearily into her lap. 

" But the old society veterans and the people 
in the younger set that were bred for this kind 
of life have developed a sixth sense that helps 
them, a sense of exhibition. I haven't it yet ; but 
by the time Aunt Crubb has finished giving her 
wedding I think it will have sprouted." 

Some days later the Bishop sat alone in the 
library of his big, silent house. He had a fire 
burning on the hearth, for he was forced to 
acknowledge that of late he had grown to find 
comfort in palliating physical ease. He could 
not have told you the details of her entrance 
perhaps that was because for an hour back he 
had been thinking of her but suddenly he 
realized that on the hearthrug before him stood 



Nancy the Joyous 69 

Nancy Lynn. Her coat lay over the arm of a 
chair as though tossed there with some vigor, and 
she was resolutely drawing off her long gloves. 

" I have come for some of the sustaining grace 
you preach about," she greeted him. 

; ' What is the trouble? " he questioned. 

" Breaking my engagement." 

"Thank God!" 

Half an hour later she sat before him in a 
straight-backed chair. 

" I had to come," she was saying. " I couldn't 
seem to think it out around Aunt Crubb." 

She outlined a pattern in the hearthrug with 
her foot. 

" It happened yesterday," she explained 
slowly, as though confidences were difficult for 
her. " I ran upstairs and when I opened the door 
of my sitting room, there, spread out over a chair 
in all its trailing white glory, lay my wedding 
dress. You see, I came on it suddenly! I think 
I must have fainted, because the next thing I 
knew I was down on the hearthrug crying rust 
spots all over the brasses." 

She glanced up bravely. Then, without an 
instant's warning, her eyes welled full of tears. 



70 Nancy the Joyous 

The Bishop's glance dropped. It was as though 
that elusive spirit in Nancy that called laughingly 
to men from a distance had crept close to him for 
sympathy. 

" There's another man," she whispered. 

She traced with the toe of her shoe upon the 
rug. When she looked into his face again, that 
something in Nancy had fled once more into its 
solitude behind the hills. But it left this middle- 
aged man humbled by the vision she had granted 
him of her essential womanhood. 

The present Nancy Lynn sat smiling at him 
with whimsical practicality. 

rf What am I going to do? " she asked. 




RS. AMELIA CRUBB 

scolded the Bishop over 
the telephone as though 
he had been a schoolboy. 
" I hold you respon- 
sible in this business. 
You encouraged her in 
it." 

" I told her if she had 
any misgivings by all means to withdraw." 

" Well, then, you had no business to inter- 
fere. She is my niece." 

" She is more than that to me," he answered 

gently. " To me she is like a daughter." 

" Humph! " said Mrs. Crubb. 

Life is not to blame that it grows commonplace 

to us. We are insentient to so many of its joys. 

For instance, the Bishop thought that he was 

anxious. In reality he was tasting a sweetness 

like rare wine in the way Nancy placed herself in 

his hands, relying on his judgment. It was not 

that his pulses quickened, as would a young 

71 



72 Nancy the Joyous 

man's. Rather, the cooling blood in his middle- 
aged veins warmed again. He felt, as near as a 
childless man could feel, as though Nancy were 
of that blood. As with a real father, the difficul- 
ties of churches and ministers were for the time 
being overtopped by her perplexities, which he 
carried around uppermost in his thoughts. 

He realized that her present position in her 
aunt's house was a trying one. 

" I'm like a sheep at a shooting match," she 
exclaimed. 

" It is no place for you at least not at pres- 
ent. I shall have to send you away," he an- 
swered thoughtfully. 

During the first days of Nancy's broken en- 
gagement a kind-faced, gray-eyed woman wear- 
ing out-of-date clothes passed through the city 
and stopped over a couple of hours, as was her 
custom, to call on the Bishop. He greeted her 
cordially. 

" I am so glad just now to have a woman to 
confer with, Miss Schuyler," he said, and 
explained to her the situation. 

" Her mother was an unusually fine woman. 
In fact, I never knew a finer woman. And the 



Nancy the Joyous 73 

daughter is like her, only she has never had a 
chance to expand naturally. Her childhood was 
spent among narrow-minded people who re- 
strained her, and these past two years she has 
been with Mrs. Amelia Crubb. You know Mrs. 
Amelia Crubb? What Nancy needs now, more 
than anything else, is the opportunity to find her 
real self." 

At the end of half an hour he concluded 
thoughtfully, " Yes. To spend the next three 
months with you would be the best possible 
thing for her." 

So they arranged it between them and at his 
bidding Nancy went. 

Hers was a vivid young personality that 
left behind it a sense of emptiness when she 
departed. This had been true even as a small 
child. By the death of her parents she had been 
left in a flock of Puritan souls, drab of wing. 
Her imagination, which made them preach to 
her luridly concerning the Prince of Liars, and 
her childish bursts of temper induced by their 
constant curbing of her temperament, made the 
succession of severe spinsters and elderly matrons 
who undertook her upbringing, despair and shift 



74 Nancy the Joyous 

her on. But each of them had felt a void when 
she had gone. 

The Bishop missed her he would not have 
believed how much he missed her. His house 
seemed empty ; his work seemed empty ; his heart 
seemed empty. As he sat in his library with his 
books unread about him, he realized that the 
3 r ears were creeping on him. He needed her 
lyric youth. 

The Committee on Diocesan Finances was 
seated one evening about the Bishop's library, 
smoking and discussing division of funds. The 
head of the diocese was sunk deep in his chair, 
his loneliness prevailing even in the midst of this 
thick cigar smoke and interchange of men's talk. 
Into that loneliness had come a tinge of appre- 
hension. Could it be that his judgment had mis- 
carried in the new, strange life he had forced 
upon Nancy? As chilly and damp we wait 
beside a slow hearth for the fire to blaze up and 
warm us, so he waited for some reassuring mes- 
sage from her. 

More than one member of the committee 
noticed his preoccupation. " Work is beginning 
to tell on him," they concluded. 



Nancy the Joyous 75 

When the maid entered with a tray of mail, 
one letter addressed to him in a crisp, round 
hand caused him to brighten visibly. An un- 
wonted flush came into his cheeks. With fingers 
trembling with anticipation and apprehension 
he slit open the envelope. It was a let- 
ter from companion-loving, laughter-seeking 
Nancy Lynn on her way to a lonely mis- 
sionary station in the heart of the Tennessee 
mountains. 

He drew out the sheets. 

" Gentlemen, excuse me." 




Dear Bishop, 

The clock has struck twelve. With the fid- 
dlers three playing and the prince's ball at its 
height, I am changed back, like another Cinder- 
ella, and flee out into the darkness. You must 
have faith in your judgment, my fairy god- 
father, or you would not work such a change 
and send a girl like me off into an isolated 
mountain settlement. I have no courage of my 
own that it is wise; I am just trusting in yours. 

Only I have been passed on so often that I 
make no protest. So here at a bend of the road 
I stop to wave good-bye and play you a gay 
little snatch of tune on my pipes, like any other 
true gypsy. 

This has been a day of creaking up into the 
mountains on the stray raveling of a branch 



76 



Nancy the Joyous 77 

railroad. Towards dusk it ran its nose into a 
cliff and stopped. I climbed down and found 
myself in an upland hamlet which clings to the 
side of the mountain. To-morrow I take horses. 
To-night I am staying at the village inn, a 
decrepit old hostelry with grooves worn in the 
tread of the stairs. When I mounted them and 
closed my door behind me, there was a clammy 
mustiness and an uncanny sense of presence in 
the room as though I had just frightened away 
a ghost. I drew a chair up in front of the table 
and sat down to wait until bedtime. Too much 
silence is over-stimulating; it is as bad as cham- 
pagne. It was comforting, then, through the 
fog of my thoughts to hear the voice of my 
good angel speaking beside me. You know she 
is the only person I have in all the world who 
has the right to scold me. That makes me fond 
of her. 

" Nancy," she began, " you've taken the trail 
again." 

" And you have, too," I told her. " People 
who wear glass slippers mustn't kick." 

" But it was not my choice," she protested. 

And for a good angel she did look so worn 



78 Nancy the Joyous 

and so bedraggled that I really had to laugh. 

" It is hard on you," I acknowledged. 

" It is telling on my nerves," she complained, 
being a woman. " Consider now : Only two 
years ago you had never heard grand opera nor 
worn silk stockings, nor met a divorced person, 
nor eaten pate de foie gras. Just as you get all 
the advantages of higher society and I think I 
can settle down for a bit of a rest, away you 
start again across the world." 

" I couldn't help it," I pleaded. " When the 
missionary woman with the kind eyes asked me 
to visit her, and the Bishop told me to go, I 
had to. Even a good angel," I reminded her 
severely, " has to mind a bishop. 

" Do you remember," I asked her, " how he 
patted me on the shoulder when he said good- 
bye at the station, and told me to come back to 
him such a woman as my mother was ? " 

" Nancy, I believe you're homesick," she said 
sternly. 

And at that I put my head down on the table 
and laughed until I cried at the idea of a girl 
that has been handed on all her life being home- 
sick. 



Nancy the Joyous 79 

" Now tell me," I taunted her, " whom have I 
to be homesick for? Aunt Crubb? You know, 
yourself, that she isn't exactly what you hanker 
for." 

" It's the Bishop," she cried, as though she had 
made a discovery. 

" Didn't you know that before? " I asked. 

But to drop the nonsense my good friend, 
I want to be honest with you. Don't deceive 
yourself in me. It is not courage that is sus- 
taining me to-night. It is not even the gentle 
memory of you. Off here alone in this eerie old 
building I acknowledge that I'm a coward. I 
had to desert the firing-line or run straight across 
to the enemy. The enemy in this case is the 
other man. 

That is a riddle but please don't try to solve 
it. To guess a riddle is so rustic, like cracking 
nuts with your teeth. 

Good night. 

Nancy. 
May 22. 




Dear Bishop, 

Here I am in Swaggerty Cove. 

At five forty-five yesterday morning a group 
of people full of friendly discouragements gath- 
ered to help me into my vehicle. They were 
undisguisedly perplexed that I should be going 
to Swaggerty. But then, so was I. 

Yesterday I accomplished thirty-five miles of 
mountain road, most of the way clinging desper- 
ately to the side of the carriage in a vain effort 
to keep stationary upon some one spot of the 
seat. Great boulders lay in the middle of the 
road. Rock ledges shouldered arrogantly into 
it from the sides. Mountain streams flowed 
down and absent-mindedly occupied it. The 
carriage would give a wild jolt and send me 

springing into mid-air. Then, as I came down, 

so 



Nancy the Joyous 81 

by some strange gyration the seat would jump 
forward and slap me soundly on the back. But 
the worst of all was a biasing skid of the wheels 
down some ledge, that gave the whole vehicle a 
side twist which snapped me from the waist 
upward as you snap the head off a snake. That 
changed my spine into a funny bone. 

By the time we reached the people with whom 
Miss Schuyler had arranged for me to pass the 
night, the sun had begun to drop down in the 
sky and the first vague thoughts of night filled 
the air. The great mountain-tops gathered up 
purple shadows from the edge of the world and 
wrapping these about their shoulders, crouched 
down for the night with their heads on their 
knees. I thought I could almost hear them 
breathing. 

To-day I mounted " Wings-of-the-Morning " 
and made Swaggerty Cove. " Wings " is a mule. 
I named him that because of his mighty spread 
of ears ; though along towards noon when he dis- 
closed a fondness for clinging musingly over the 
edge of precipices, I wished I had christened 
him " Parachute." 

My dear Bishop, this place to which you have 



82 Nancy the Joyous 

exiled me is nothing but a handful. When I 
come home I'll slip it into my pocket and bring 
it back to show you. Two long, green, timbered 
mountain ranges stand side by side like two 
loaves of bread, with just enough space squeezed 
down between them for a narrow ribbon of bot- 
tomland, a slow valley creek and a stretch of vil- 
lainous mountain road. Scattered along this are 
a dozen log houses. Behold Swaggerty! Hon- 
estly, now, do you think that is big enough to 
satisfy me? Every one of the dozen cabins is 
exactly like every other one. Suppose some day 
I should get to hankering for variety. But you 
have vouched for me and so for your sake I'll 
try. 

Wings and I found the entire settlement out 
waiting for us. Miss Schuyler had been called 
off to the mountain-top to nurse a sick man, but 
she left word with them to care for me. She 
must have suggested something about my being 
tired or homesick, for Swaggerty took me to its 
arms. One old mountain woman lifted me down 
bodily out of the saddle and the rest gathered 
round, addressing to one another, sotto voce, 
such remarks as, " How snug she be built!'* 



Nancy the Joyous 83 

" Law, but ain't her hair pretty! " It wasn't 
" What piffling little feet! " 

After they had taken my points old Aunt 
Hiley Ann, the mother in Israel who took me 
in charge, swept me away from them into her 
own cabin. 

" Don't you know the young-un is all petered 
out?" she cried shrilly. 

She seated me before her fireplace in a 
straight-backed splint chair while she stirred up 
with her leathern hands an awful dough of corn 
meal and water and baked it in a bed of ashes. 
All the time my fascinated eyes watched her, 
knowing I was doomed to eat it. But worse 
than that, the sense of homesickness I have been 
fending off every moment since I took my hand 
out of yours, was drawing in closer about me. 
It had me cornered. I couldn't seem to fight it 
inside those log walls with patch-quilts grinning 
from the beds and shotguns aiming at me from 
their pegs. 

Do you know this was to have been the day 
for Aunt Crubb's bridal dinner? The "walls were 
to be veiled with smilax and orchids, fragrant as 
spring and beautiful as the bosom of a sunset. 



84 Nancy the Joyous 

The centerpiece was to be a bank of orchids and 
grapes; and there wasn't to be a thing on the 
menu you could pronounce. I was to wear a 
" creation " no, Bishop, that's not Biblical ; 
it's a dress. I've worn creations for nearly two 
years now. This one was violet chiffon over 
pink messaline, designed, so Madame announced, 
with special reference to my complexion and 
eyes. Aunt Crubb told the Desirable Party 
what Madame said and he remembered it. I, 
myself, have only an impression that she con- 
sidered me becoming to it. Aunt Crubb was to 
resign her place to it and it was to sit at the 
head of the table. As I sat there, watching that 
awful hoecake brown on top, I could have put 
my head down on my knees and cried for it. 

What I want to-night is to lean my head 
against someone and sniffle. The Desirable 
Party is a good man, friend o' mine; he would 
have answered beautifully, and so I am almost 
lonesome for him. I do not dare want you, for 
you are the one that sent me away. When I 
think of that it is a challenge and it stiffens my 
back. Only I distinctly don't want my back stif- 
fened; I want to cry. But I shan't. 



Nancy the Joyous 85 

After I had eaten the hoecake yes, I did 
- it was time for bed. Miss Schuyler had said 
that she might have to sit up all night, but that 
I was to make myself at home in her cabin and 
she would be back in time for breakfast. So here 
I am alone. She left word that I wasn't to be 
afraid. 

When I was a little child and everything was 
at ebb, father and mother used to talk about 
some person they called David. Father would 
put his arms round mother and tell her if he were 
like David she would not have had to work so 
hard. Mother would smile and say that David 
was the best balanced man she knew and that she 
would put me in his care if they two were taken ; 
but that it was his dear faults she loved father 
for. Afterwards, when they were both gone, I 
honestly believed that David would come for me. 
That first winter at Jones' Corners I remember 
threatening my doll to leave her behind if she 
kept on being saucy to Cousin Eliza. While I 
brushed and braided my hair to-night it all came 
back to me; and I wished, just as I used to, that 
he would sweep in and carry me away. But 
instead, here is a trifling legacy of his preparing 



86 Nancy the Joyous 

to spend the night alone among the moonshiners 
in a log cabin that has not even a lock on the 
door. I guess I'll hurry into bed. I'm tired. 

Nancy. 
May 24. 




T WAS the day set for 
Nancy's wedding. But 
instead of being in the 
center of a kind of white 
satin flurry, with a circle 
of smiling, tearful friends 
running at her least 
request, she was wander- 
ing aimlessly about a 
cluster of log houses. She had a feeling of lack 
of adjustment to Swaggerty Cove and to this 
particular day. 

Nancy stood in the highway looking towards 
the mountain-tops as Aunt Hiley Ann came 
along from the spring carrying a pail of water. 
Setting the bucket down in the road, she doubled 
her fingers into her palms and rested her knuck- 
les on her hips. 

" You wouldn't have anything like this if you 
was back where you come from," she remarked 
with a kind of possessive pride in the land- 
scape. 

87 



88 Nancy the Joyous 

As Aunt Hiley Ann reached down again for 
her pail she added, as though condoning with 
Nancy for the disadvantages of her former life: 

" But if us were all alike we'd get so tired 
of living we'd wish the old world'd sink." 

Nancy laughed. 

" Let me carry your pail for you." 

" But I'm heartier'n you be! " 

Then it came to this good old mountain 
woman that the offer was a mark of respect to 
her years. Years are no dishonor in Swaggerty 
Cove. She handed over the bucket and walked 
along by Nancy's side, her head held proudly as 
though it had been crowned. 

About this time there jogged down the road 
a lank mountaineer on muleback, in one arm 
carefully carrying a large package. He was a 
messenger come all the way from the railroad, 
where he had been warned that the box was 
billed fragile. The man drew rein alongside and 
handed it down to Nancy. 

" I reckon this be your'n." 

" How did he know me? " Nancy asked Aunt 
Hiley Ann. 

" Law, child, you ain't like us. YouVe got a 



Nancy the Joyous 89 

different kick to your heels when you walk." 

Nancy began tearing off the wrappings, scat- 
tering them about her in the road. From out 
them she brought forth a rarely beautiful bride's 
bouquet of roses encircled by a shower of lilies- 
of-the-valley and orange blossoms. 

" What be it? " asked Aunt Hiley Ann with 
awe. 

11 1 should call it a silent reminder." 

Nancy stood looking down at her flowers. A 
flock of bramble-scratched children had gath- 
ered and were shoving about her feet for the 
florist's wrappings, A cow that was wandering 
at large along the roadway stopped, pushed its 
nose in under her elbow and nibbled at the 
streamers. 

" Shoo! " from Aunt Hiley Ann. 

Then a sudden whim, half pain, half humor, 
filled Nancy. She gathered the bouquet up 
against her breast and spread mockingly across 
her face that rapt, far-seeing look of brides. 

" Tum-tum-te-tum," she hummed. " Fall in 
behind, children." 

Glancing back over her shoulder at them, she 
caught sight of the cow at the end of the line, 



90 Nancy the Joyous 

a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley, all slobbery, hang- 
ing out each side of her mouth. 

"If only Aunt Crubb could see my wedding 
procession!" she cried. 

So they marched up to the door and into Miss 
Schuyler's cabin, the last youngster kicking 
backward with his heels to drive off the cow. 

"See my wedding bouquet!" cried Nancy 
handing it over. 

In the center of the room stood Miss Schuyler 
in one of her plain, straight calico gowns. She 
held the flowers off from her in order to view 
them better, smiling softly as one smiles upon an 
old photograph. 

:< To think that I used to live in the midst 
of such beautiful things! What's this?" draw- 
ing out a card embedded in the flowers. " ' Mr. 
Peyton Weston Williams/ ' 

She drew his wedding bouquet up into her 
arms and stood with its streamers swaying about 
her. " I used to know him. He is a very fine 
man, my dear." 

' What am I going to do with it? " inquired 
Nancy. * You can't just throw your wedding 
bouquet away but " glancing around the plain 



Nancy the Joyous 91 

little log room "I could never live in the house 
with it. It looks so worldly and extravagant." 

" Flura Jeems is to be married this after- 
noon," Miss Schuyler suggested. " You might 
take it up to her." 

Nancy nodded assent. 

" Good-bye, friends," she laughed, waving the 
little children out through the door. *' I'm sorry, 
but you will have to excuse me. I'm going to a 
wedding." 

The trail to Flura Jeems' led up from the 
valley road to a cove on the mountain-side, end- 
ing at the threshold of a single cabin. The door 
stood open but Nancy knocked which was a 
very polite thing to do. The rest of Swaggerty 
would have walked right in. A stocky man 
bound about the brows with a strip of dirty 
cloth, and an apathetic little bride were waiting 
inside. They had heard about Nancy Lynn and 
were flattered by her coming. As an inducement 
to keep her for the wedding they assured her 
that a real preacher was " to do the j'ining," and 
not the usual justice of the peace. 

Soon Aunt Reesy Devin, the mother-in-law- 
to-be, came up the trail to the cabin. Aunt 



92 

Reesy was a lank, grizzled old woman with keen 
blue eyes and an exaggerated spryness of move- 
ment which is elderly coquetry. Behind her 
walked the mountaineer bridegroom and a nice, 
black-garbed, earnest young fellow fresh from 
the divinity school. Aunt Reesy was too ener- 
getic for mere greetings. She stepped aside and 
hurried her followers into the house before her. 

The young divine entered with a swinging 
stride. " Howdy," he called out cheerily in local 
parlance. But when inside the low-raftered, 
dirty little log cabin he discovered a girl, with a 
pair of wonderful violet eyes, holding a kind of 
floral monument, he stopped short and blinked 
hard. Nancy watched him do it. 

" I'm the wedding guest," she explained 
softly. 

He advanced with his hand extended frankly. 

" And I'm the minister." 

It at once occurred to Nancy that he would 
have amused her Aunt Crubb, but she liked him. 

" Oh, please let me help you with the marry- 
ing. I've been making a special study of wed- 
ding functions." 

He smiled his consent; in fact he smiled sev- 



Nancy the Joyous 93 

eral things, including his good fellowship and 
his admiration. 

The mountaineers, who are wary and silent, 
watched with interest this offhand way of get- 
ting acquainted. 

" All right, then," cried Nancy companion- 
ably; " you take the speaking part and I'll do the 
stage directing." 

First she gave the bride the flowers to hold. 
This made Aunt Reesy so envious that Nancy 
took off her embroidered collar and pinned it 
around Aunt Reesy's neck. 

" You're the bridesmaid and you're the 
groomsman," she explained to the elderly pair. 

" What be they? " asked Aunt Reesy. 

Nancy shook her head dubiously. 
' What are they? " she asked, turning to the 
young preacher. 

He was not taking the wedding as seriously 
as he should, for Nancy's spirit was contagious. 

" The end men," he replied promptly. 

" Exactly," agreed Nancy. " You stand at 
this end and you stand at that." 

She arranged the four mountaineers, hitching 
and shoving one another, in a row, the bridal 



94 Nancy the Joyous 

couple in the middle. After she had them sta- 
tioned to her satisfaction, the attending couple 
leaned forward and gazed into each other's faces, 
Aunt Reesy palpitating with excitement. 

" Now mayn't I sing the wedding march? " 
begged Nancy. " Somehow I always felt that 
the organist is really the man that does the 
marrying." 

" But this isn't your wedding," he answered, 
flushing around the ears. 

" It came mighty close to being," she returned. 

Already the young minister hated to deny her 
anything. 

" I'm afraid we could not keep them in place 
long enough," he said gently. 

He was right about it. The row of moun- 
taineers was shuffling restlessly. 

"I'll ride over some other day and hear you 
sing it," he suggested. 

Then resolutely focusing his attention away 
from Nancy, he adjusted his ministerial voice. 

But the bridesmaid interrupted him. 

" I reckon, preacher, I be-n't in the right 
place," she said, slipping round to the other end 
of the line. 



Nancy the Joyous 95 

Nancy lead her authoritatively back and he 
began once more. Again the bridesmaid took a 
determined stand by the old man's side. 

" Seems like this be the right place," she 
stated with a show of argument in her voice. 

Nancy shooed her back into position. 

" Go on," she said to him. " I'll keep her fixed 
with my eye; but be quick about it." 

A chorus of voices gave the responses, the two 
lusty old ones leading. In vain they remon- 
strated. Aunt Reesy Devin was gleeful to the 
point of frivolity. But when the Reverend Mr. 
MacDonald was gathering up his hat and his rid- 
ing whip, her movements grew perceptibly 
slower. Finally she faced him determinedly. 
She pointed a lean hand towards the groomsman. 

" See here," she announced, " I don't want no 
halfway work. I wants to know whether him and 
me is really married." 

Nancy coughed back a laugh. 

" And that's what I wants to know," she 
demanded. 

They two left the cabin and followed the trail 
together down to the point where it was joined 
by a little threading by-path that ran off along 



96 Nancy the Joyous 

the bench of the mountain. He had come by 
that trail and had tied his saddle horse at the 
heading of the ways. 

It was just the hour when the bridesmaids and 
ushers were to have stepped back and Nancy 
Lynn was to have turned and walked down the 
aisle with her train and her veil and the man she 
had married and all his riches dragging like 
weights on her soul. 

Alec MacDonald held the hand she offered 
him at parting and said something about mar- 
riage being the most solemn thing in the world. 
To his complete astonishment she cried bitterly, 
" I know it! " and turning, fled from him down 
the path. And as she ran the awfulness of the 
thing she had come so near doing beat like wings 
in her ears. 

"Thank God I didn't," she whispered. 
" Thank God that at least I have a right to my 
dreams!" 



HE Bishop carried 
Nancy's next letter 
around in his pocket 
until the envelope grew 
frayed. When he was 
alone he would read it, 
smiling to himself and 
saying, " Well, well, 
well." Sometimes he 
added, " Her mother might have written that let- 
ter." Sometimes, " All that about her caring for 
someone is just a notion of hers. She is virtually 
nothing but a little girl; this letter shows that. 
All she needs is a chance to expand." And then 
he would reread: 




J. 



My dear Bishop, 

Do you remember how it felt to be young and 
happy? I wake in the morning carrying a joy with 
me but of my dreams and I go to sleep with it at night. 
I wander in and out of the houses singing love-songs, 
which is scandalous in a land wholly given up to hymn- 
tunes. And everywhere, everywhere, opposite me on 

97 



98 Nancy the Joyous 

the other side of the hearthstones, out in the field-rows 
where the men and women work, I seem to catch the hint 
of a face and sometimes I hear a voice. 

This handful of log houses, instead of being monot- 
onous, is as droll and varied as a child's story. Think 
of a land where a woman who wants a new broom goes 
out into the woods, fells a sapling and splits up an end 
of it into a brush; or a man who needs shoes like as 
not sits down before his hearth and makes them himself. 
I feel convinced that in the days when Mercury wan- 
dered the earth in disguise among the little old Roman 
settlements, the sandals he wore were of his own making. 
That would be part of his fun in pretending he was 
human. 

Don't worry about me. The entire settlement is tak- 
ing care of my mortal frame and the young minister 
is in charge of my soul. He has been over, thirty miles 
on horseback, three times since I wrote you last. My 
chances of Heaven look bright. 

He says that gladness like mine is religion. I tell 
him it is no such thing; that it is fixing your eyes 
obstinately on love and stirring up your relations. He 
does not understand, the way you do, that when a girl 
gives you a peek into her heart that way, the comfort- 
able thing all round is to change the subject at once. 
He would rather sit on the doorstep and talk encourag- 
ingly. But by the time he gets to be a bishop he will 
probably know better, too. In the funny old days 



Nancy the Joyous 99 

when you were carrying the dignity of your first min- 
isterial black suit and the other Annie Laird wore 
sprigged muslins, you may have counseled her wisely 
and at length between father and David. I reckon 
your influence must have leaned towards father or you 
would not have written me that my old friend David 
had been " neglectful of a precious legacy." Neglect- 
ful? Never! What could he have done with a very 
little person that kicked when she got mad? 

The sun is setting and I hear my friend Marget 
shouting her way down the road and singing out of 
tune at the top of her lungs. She is teaching me to 
milk and I can work both hands now, though I can't 
make them go at the same time. I see that in time I 
shall become competent and versatile. Now I am, 

Your happy, 

Nancy. 
June 10. 




O THE weeks passed, 
bringing Nancy Lynn 
new insight. Among 
other things, she learned 
that she was living in the 
house with a celebrity. 
Every now and then an 
earnest soul from some 
distant station rode into 
this valley for a conference with gentle, far- 
sighted Miss Schuyler. She would lay her hand 
on Nancy's arm and say, 

" This is the little friend the Bishop sent in to 
brighten Swaggerty for us." 

Then they would make a tapioca pudding, take 
down something from their shelf of precious 
canned goods and pretend they were having a 
party. You would not believe how festive they 
grew over a stray brother or sister of the fold and 
a stew of canned oysters. 

But when Miss Schuyler and the visitor settled 

down to a discussion of the problems of their 

100 



Nancy the Joyous 101 

work, Nancy sat listening in her corner, awed by 
the quiet enthusiasm of these people. 

One day Miss Schuyler came in wearing a smile 
that made her plain face beautiful. 

" A man over from Lonesome Creek has just 
brought me word that a friend of mine will be 
here for the night." 

'* Who is it? " asked Nancy eagerly. 

" I am going to keep that a surprise," returned 
Miss Schuyler. 

So they brushed and brightened the cabin until 
it took on a look of welcome and anticipation. 
Then they waited while the dusk thickened. 

Nancy grew disappointed. 

" She could not ride over as late as this." 

" Oh, yes, she will. Riding in the dark never 
daunts her." 

Soon they heard hoof-beats along the road 
and hurried out. 

"I was late in starting," explained the guest, 
after the preliminary greetings were over. 

In the dusk Nancy could know nothing of this 
woman's personality except the touch of her 
hand and the sound of her voice ; but she was won 
by these. It was a voice that suggested organ 



102 Nancy the Joyous 

music; soft and strong, womanly yet full of 
vitality. She seemed to catch you up and bear 
you adrift on the full-flowing tide of her cheer- 
fulness. 

" I was late in starting. At the last minute I 
had to go over and doctor Aunt Letty. She sent 
word that she had * the flippin' disease.' ' 

" Nervous indigestion? " 

' Yes. I dosed her a bit and told her she must 
be careful what she eats. But Aunt Letty says 
' I don't wanter eat what I oughter; I wanter eat 
what I wanter.' ' 

When they had pastured the horse and were 
near the cabin door, this woman waited a minute 
in the dark. 

" I want one more breath before I go inside. 
I have had to be away from all this so long." 

Nancy thought that in the " horseshoe " at the 
opera she had never seen a woman with so fine a 
carriage. But when the lamplight inside the 
cabin fell on the woman's face Nancy shrank 
back from it! 

It had one time been a beautiful face but was 
now hopelessly burned and scarred. 

" Oh, how did it happen! " cried Nancy in a 



Nancy the Joyous 103 

distressed whisper. Miss Darrit had gone into 
her sleeping room to freshen up after her ride. 

Miss Sehuyler explained. Miss Darrit lived 
in a valley buried farther from the world, more 
deeply poverty-ridden and ignorant than theirs. 
Her home was an isolated, windowless log cabin. 
There had been much sickness on her mountain 
and once, when she came home from a night of 
nursing, she fainted and fell with her face in the 
ashes of the fireplace. The pain of it finally 
brought her to. Then she dragged herself up 
and, alone, ministered to her wounds until morn- 
ing. Following this came weeks of suffering in 
a hospital. She had now just left the world 
again and brought the poor, marred ruins of her- 
self back to her post. 

" I did not tell you about her before for fear 
you would pity her." 

" I would not dare pity a woman like that." 

The bedroom door opened and Miss Darrit 
entered with a fine unself-consciousness that a 
queen might envy. 

They drew the supper table up in front of 
the rude hearth of the cabin and sat talking about 
it until late in the night. 



104 Nancy the Joyous 

" I have been needed so badly while I was 
away," smiled Miss Darrit. " For one thing, 
the children have got into the ' church-house ' and 
almost ruined my organ. As Aunt Letty says, 
' You can't make much fuss on it any more. 
Some of the keys don't make any fuss at all.' ' 

Then, as usual, as the hours wore on they 
began to talk seriously and Nancy was but an 
outsider to it. Something gripped her heart 
when she realized that she was living among 
people who met life in this spirit. Nancy Lynn 
knew about sacrificing greatly for a person one 
loves, but these women were doing it for human- 
ity. And humanity is such a vast, formless, 
cumbersome thing! 

" Oh, yes, Miss Schuyler," remarked the guest 
as they rose at last from the table, " I have a 
message for you from a friend, a Mr. Peyton 
Williams. He was introduced to me while I was 
waiting at the gate to take my train, and he put 
me on." 

" For me? " asked Miss Schuyler in surprise. 

"Yes, he " 

" Are you sure it was for me? " 

' Yes. He said, ' I have a friend down there 



Nancy the Joyous 105 

at a place called Swaggerty Cove. If you hap- 
pen to meet her tell her I am always at her 
bidding.' " 

Miss Schuyler's cheeks flushed slightly. 
Nancy bent her head over the table where she 
was gathering up the plates. 

" I knew Mr. Williams once, but I think that 
was probably intended for Nancy." 

" Possibly. You see I knew nothing then 
about Miss Lynn's being here." 

Nancy raised her eyes to Miss Schuyler. She 
felt as though she had stolen the sacred silver 
vessels from an altar to play with. 

That night when the lights were out and the 
cabin stood a formless shadow in the wide, lonely, 
formless darkness that spread out over the moun- 
tains, Nancy lay awake. 

" I know now why the Bishop sent me in here," 
she thought. " It was to show me how trivial I 
am." 

After an hour of wakefulness Nancy Lynn 
decided, just as many another young girl who 
carries an ache in her heart has done, that since 
these women had found peace, the way to ease 
her own pain was to stretch her soul out to the 



106 Nancy the Joyous 

proportions of theirs. She pulled away at it, 
the way you lay a carpet, and tacked it down all 
around with good resolutions. There was a 
stretch and a strain across the middle of it that 
hurt, but at last Nancy Lynn fell asleep, con- 
fidently believing that it would hold. 




ANCY LYNN honestly 
believed that the beauti- 
ful flower of renunciation 
had taken root in her soul. 
She thought the tacks 
would hold ; but suddenly, 
about three days later, 
pop! up they all pulled, 
and Nancy shrank back 
to her natural proportions. 

Incidentally, a good deal of original sin had 
accumulated during those soul-stretching days 
and had to be worked off. The store-keeper of 
Swaggerty Cove was the first one to suffer. She 
seemed never to see the little store quietly locked 
up that she was not possessed with a desire to 
buy something. It stood in the heart of the 
settlement and to the uninitiated looked like a 
shed. Buying and selling in Swaggerty is largely 
a matter of barter, with eggs and chickens 
for legal tender. Nancy bought up a flock of 
her own she opened a bank account, as it 

107 



108 Nancy the Joyous 

were. She learned to pass an egg across the 
counter and ask for an egg's worth of matches 
while she gazed nonchalantly at the three bolts 
of calico on the shelf. She got positive joy from 
snatching up a live chicken by the legs and 
swinging it, squawking and protesting at her 
side, down the road to the store. There she pulled 
a bell-rope and sat down at the foot of the bell- 
pole with her hen for company until the store- 
keeper, who was primarily a farmer, finished his 
plough row or his pipe or his bit of gossip, and 
sauntered down the road to wait on her. 

To this much-tried man's relief the young 
minister from Dry Branch arrived on horseback 
to spend a week in Swaggerty. He had lately 
been appointed in charge of a large belt of this 
country and had come over, as he said, to get 
acquainted with his people. He was to lodge 
with Aunt Hiley Ann and dine around among 
the folks. What he really did was to take Mon- 
day dinner with Marget. The rest of the time 
he spent at Miss Schuyler's " so as to discuss 
plans." 

Young Alec MacDonald thought that it 
would also be well for Nancy to get acquainted, 



Nancy the Joyous 109 

so one day they sauntered together up the gully 
to call on Betsy Jane Skidmore. Betsy Jane 
was not exactly an exemplary character, but the 
social lines lie out broad and flat in that world. 
At the end of the call young Alec MacDonald 
glanced twice uneasily at Nancy and then, fol- 
lowing circuit-preacher etiquette, asked if they 
might have a short season of prayer. 

Betsy Jane was sitting tilted back on the hind 
legs of a straight, splint-bottom chair, smoking 
her pipe. She spread out her hands in cordial 
expansiveness and answered, quite as though he 
had asked for a drink of water. 

" Jes' he'p yourself; he'p yourself." 

Betsy Jane kept her seat. Alec MacDonald 
and Nancy knelt down on the puncheon floor 
and he got through with it somehow. He was 
embarrassed and Nancy liked him for it. For 
that matter, she was embarrassed too, for it was 
the first time she had ever walked into a woman's 
house and offered to pray for her. 

After that Nancy decided to stay home and 
make the desserts and let Miss Schuyler go off 
with him rounding up the flock. But there were 
slow strolls through the lush grass of the creek 



110 Nancy the Joyous 

bottom in the purple twilight, during which 
Swaggerty, undisguisedly sitting out on its 
thresholds to watch them, concluded that they 
must be " fixing their love " on each other. And 
there were long quiet talks, sitting together on 
the cabin doorstep while the lights of Swaggerty 
one by one went out and the night became theirs. 
Sunday morning Alec MacDonald held his 
first sendee in Swaggerty Valley. It was a beau- 
tiful, clean summer day, so the folks came down 
out of the coves and ridges and sat in rows across 
the little log " church house," their solemn faces 
raised to him. He had put thought into his ser- 
mon, in his thorough Scotch way; and he had 
put into it also a young man's enthusiasm for 
his own century. It was a good, logical discourse 
on the modern movement towards the brother- 
hood of man. He led them on with words and 
illustrations vividly objective, ending with a 
realistic description of the sinking of a ship at 
sea. These mountaineers had never seen the sea ; 
in fact they had never seen more water than the 
creek and the mill pond held; but the stolid folk 
sat spellbound under the magic of his words 
which painted the line of men drawn up on deck 



Nancy the Joyous 111 

with the captain standing, pistol in hand, threat- 
ening to shoot down any man of them that stirred 
hand or foot until the sailors had put off the 
women and children. 

Nancy felt the atmosphere of public opinion 
was a trifle too rarified but Alec MacDonald was 
gratified to the point of self -congratulation on 
the impression his sermon seemed to have made. 

That afternoon Miss Schuyler had gone up 
into the mountain to visit one of her sick. 
MacDonald was sitting in the open doorway, 
not reading, but looking down at a book he was 
holding. Inside, Nancy's footsteps sounded 
back and forth across the cabin floor. Later, 
while thus busying herself, she caught the sound 
of protesting voices outside and looking up, dis- 
covered four of the Swaggerty men standing in 
a semicircle before the young minister. It was a 
delegation of the citizens. 

' We come to say that throwing the women 
and children overboard and saving the men don't 
look right to us, preacher." 

Nancy chuckled audibly; but when she saw 
poor Alec MacDonald sit resourceless before 
this mistrust of his chivalry, she realized that the 



112 Nancy the Joyous 

situation was grave. It was a question of sav- 
ing his future influence in Swaggerty Cove. 

She stepped forward and stood with her slim 
figure framed by the doorway. 

" Uncle Lemmie," she began, " do you remem- 
ber that the other day I called your sled a stone- 
boat and you didn't know what I meant ? " 

Nancy turned to the other end of the semi- 
circle where stood the much harassed store- 
keeper. 

" And, Mr. Teeter, you know yesterday you 
handed me down a horse collar when I went to 
the store for some paper and asked for a pad. 
' Put off ' to us folks doesn't mean to throw the 
women and children overboard. It means to put 
them into the lifeboats and save them." 

" Now, Mr. MacDonald," continued Nancy, 
" you tell them how last summer, when your 
steamer went down, you held up a perfectly 
strange girl with one hand and swam with the 
other for an hour until a boat picked you both 
up just as you were going down together." 

Nancy disappeared, but a moment later 
stepped again to the threshold. 

" He was out on a lake. That is a pond deeper 



Nancy the Joyous 113 

than the tallest pine tree and as broad as from 
here to the railroad. Think of starting out to 
swim to the railroad and dragging a girl along, 
besides. Make him tell you about it, Uncle 
Lemmie." 

And once more Nancy retreated from the 
meeting. 

Alec MacDonald took it so much to heart that 
after they had gone, Nancy went out and sat 
on the doorstep beside him. She began talking 
a long way off from the subject. 

" Beautiful old mountain," she murmured, her 
eyes resting on the great ridge that reared itself 
up from the opposite bank of the long valley. 

" I went up it again yesterday to see Betsy 
Jane Skidmore. Betsy Jane paid you as high a 
compliment as is possible in this belt of country. 
She said, ' I'd git up and quit eatin' fried chicken 
any day to hear the new preacher talk.' ' 

She was careful not to glance his way but let 
her gaze drop to the lean, brown highway that 
ran through the long valley. 

" I used to think that was a villainous piece of 
road but now I've got feelings about it. It seems 
august to me, like the old Roman roads that 



114 Nancy the Joyous 

used to join the scattered parts of the world." 

Having thus shied off again from the tender 
point, she allowed herself to scan him warily out 
of the corners of her eyes, and noted signs of his 
being reconciled to life again. 

Uncle Lemmie was riding along the road 
below them. 

" Uncle Lemmie must be going to see his son- 
in-law. Son-in-law has a sick horse. Uncle 
Lemmie says, ' The new preacher has sense. Us 
folks round here know a few things when we 
can think of 'em ; but he has sense.' ' 

Then Nancy cast tact to the winds. 

" There is one thing we have to remember in 
here," she began earnestly so earnestly that 
she laid her hand on his arm. He quickly covered 
it with his. Nancy snatched her fingers away. 

" Oh, say, no; let's not," she said boyishly. 

" The thing to remember is that their mental 
store is limited to just what eyes can see, hands 
touch and souls reach towards, up and down our 
valley road. You have to pack away in your 
wardrobe trunk all your furbelows of thought 
and just gather about your feet this little heap 
of worn, patched ideas. And you have to keep 



Nancy the Joyous 115 

your eyes sighting along the line of their point of 
view. I discovered that lately when we cele- 
brated Fourth of July here in Swaggerty. We 
held strictly to the purpose originally designed 
for the day. You would have thought that the 
British were stationed up there on the top of the 
ridge w r ith cannon and bayonet, ready to descend 
at any minute. But I just followed around with 
the crowd and whooped her up with genuine 
enthusiasm because we had whipped the English. 
You have to keep not so much within their 
vocabulary as within their ideas." 

Then Nancy's voice grew tender. 

" It is just like talking to a child," she said 
softly. She stretched her hands out over her 
knees into a kind of cup, as though a child were 
kneeling there and she gathered its little face 
between them. 

" Just play house and doll babies with broken 
heads; but within that little circle you can reach 
out and lay your hands on all the biggest things 
in the universe." 

Nancy's voice trailed away into silence. She 
crossed her arms on her knees and laid her cheek 
down on her wrists. 



116 Nancy the Joyous 

" Did you know," she asked softly after a 
time, " that the Chinese are past masters in the 
culinary art ? Bird nests, shark fins, deer sinews, 
bird tongues, fish brains, shrimp eggs and many 
other extraordinary dishes make up the every- 
day menu." 




UNT HILEY ANN was 
taken sick. This fact 
spread an air of impor- 
tance through the settle- 
ment. For one thing, 
the doctor from Salt Lick 
came dashing in on his 
thoroughbred mount with 
a quick beat of hoofs. 
For an eighty miles of country the mountaineers 
proudly claimed the doctor from Salt Lick, yet 
drew back timidly from him. He swung himself 
out of his saddle in his hurried way and tossed 
the bridle to one of the bystanders ; but he entered 
the cabin leisurely, as though he had merely 
dropped in from an afternoon saunter. 

He was sitting by Aunt Hiley Ann's bed, 
counting pulse beats and looking at his watch, 
when he detected a kind of official stir and shuffle 
of feet among the mountaineers crowding the 
cabin behind him. He felt the presence of some- 
one at his side, but waited until he had finished 

117 



118 Nancy the Joyous 

counting before he looked up. There stood a 
girl whose slender figure conveyed an impression 
of worldliness. 

" Is she very sick? " asked the girl. 

"Yes; she is." 

" But Miss Schuyler has gone off to a con- 
vention. I shan't be able to get her back for five 
days." 

The doctor from Salt Lick grew stern. 

' There is no need to send for Miss Schuyler. 
It is a bad case of pneumonia; but if you do just 
as I tell you to, I think we can bring her 
through." 

His eyes did not swerve from their first focus 
on Nancy's face. They gave her no quarter. 
Moreover, their expression came close to being 
antagonistic at her dread of responsibility. 

"All right; I will," she promised, squaring 
herself to meet his gaze. 

" Then get me a kettle of hot water the first 
thing," he ordered turning a blank shoulder 
towards her. 

Nancy was humbled. 

Among the mountaineers it is the custom for 
the kinfolk to the most distant family ramifica- 



Nancy the Joyous 119 

tions to move in and camp around a sick bed 
with much gossiping and frying of chickens, 
smoking of pipes and fretting of visiting babies. 
Then the " lovering couples " of the settlement 
sit up nights with the invalid to do their courting. 
This is not heartlessness, but just the etiquette of 
sympathy and the old human hunger for excite- 
ment. Sickness in an isolated world is exciting. 

With directness and authority, the doctor from 
Salt Lick sent all that cabin-full of people away 
with definite orders that they were to stay away. 
Marget was to have the care of Aunt Hiley Ann 
daytimes and Miss Lynn was to nurse her nights. 
There were to be medicines every fifteen minutes 
night and day and all manner of disagreeable 
duties. 

When he had established this order of things 
and was prepared to leave, he asked for a drink 
of water and Nancy obediently brought him a 
dipperful from the bucket. He drank half of 
it, tossed the rest out into the yard, and flung 
himself into his saddle. As his horse started at 
a gallop, he turned and lifted his hat. In the 
door-yard of the cabin he was leaving stood a 
slim little figure, all its worldliness dropped from 



120 Nancy the Joyous 

it, watching after him with a pair of anxious 
violet eyes. 

When he stopped for his professional visit 
the following day, he cast a scrutinizing glance 
around the place. The pile of ashes on the hearth 
showed that a fire had been kept burning there 
all night, according to his orders. A big iron 
kettle of hot water hung on a crane above it, 
ready for use in case the patient's temperature 
fell to sub-normal. The doctor was satisfied. 

'What is this?" he asked, pushing his feet 
into a litter of whittlings on the floor. 

Nancy smiled in a tired way but her voice was 
steady. 

' Those are mine. I found that if you whittle 
it helps. I whittled most all night long. Looks 
like a cooper shop, doesn't it?" 

" Good idea," he returned professionally. 

Then he examined his patient, gave fresh 
orders and hurried away. 

On his next call he inquired of Nancy how she 
was standing up under the long night watches. 

" I met MacDonald on his way over here and 
I told him he must not come. I said Miss 
Schuyler was off and you had your hands full 



Nancy the Joyous 121 

now and needed all the sleep you could get." 

"What did he say?" 

" What does anyone say to the doctor's 
orders? Nothing. Just follows them." 

" I like Mr. MacDonald," volunteered Nancy 
with a note of comparison in her voice. 

"Do you? So do I." 

On the following days Nancy was sleeping 
when he came, so he did not see her again until 
the early dawn of the seventh morning. Then 
one of his long, hard rides took him down through 
Swaggerty Valley in the gray morning twilight. 
The cabins lay silent and smokeless in this pocket 
of the big, mountain world. Only in the open 
doorway of one of them crouched a solitary lit- 
tle figure. It was Nancy Lynn. The doctor 
from Salt Lick saw her there, dismounted and 
sat down on the threshold beside her. They 
could scarcely discern each other's faces through 
the dusk. 

" You need a wrap around your shoulders. 
This air is damp." 

Nancy shivered but did not move. He slipped 
off his coat and laid it carelessly around her 
shoulders. 



122 Nancy the Joyous 

" Been whittling? " he inquired, smiling at the 
pile of shavings on the ground before her. 

" Yes ; only these last few nights I have sat 
out here on the step and whittled. I have been 
having the wide, soft, wonderful darkness all to 
myself and I've learned the faces of the stars." 

" What do you think about? " 

" About a bishop and a diplomat, mostly. I'm 
in good company." 

; ' The hardest part of sitting up is after mid- 
night. The strain is from then on until you 
begin to get the feel of the morning in the air." 

" Yes ; that's true," cried Nancy with convic- 
tion. " You are firm and set of purpose until 
the turn of the night and then something within 
you has worn out. About that time I seem to 
lose my hold on the bishop and the diplomat." 
Nancy laughed nervously. ' Then every night 
a girl named Nancy seems to come laughing and 
mocking down the valley. She finds me sitting 
here alone on the doorstep, the way you did, and 
she tilts her chin and asks: 

" Who are you? ' 

" ' I'm Annie Lynn,' I answer. 

" ' For goodness sakes,' she laughs, ' then you 



Nancy the Joyous 123 

must be a relative of mine. But someone told 
me,' she goes on pestering, ' that you were 
planning to spend this summer in a villa of your 
own on the Italian lakes. What are you doing 
here ? ' 

" ' As I'd be done by,' I tell her. 

" And then the horrid thing does a little 
shuffling dance in the road and says: 

* Well, then you're having a good time. You 
always did enjoy new sensations.' 

" And I give the jackknife a fling out into 
the yard and put my face down on my knees and 
wonder if that is all there is in it for me. There's 
the jackknife out there." 

The doctor took out his watch. 
' You need sleep," he stated. " You go home 
and go to bed and I'll wait here till Marget 
comes." 

Nancy demurred. 

" I'm not a quitter," she answered stiffly. 

" No, you are not. I've discovered that. But 
still you must go to bed. I'm looking for the 
crisis to-night. If we can pull her through that 
I think we have her safe. I am going to come 
back and stay and I want you in good form 



124 Nancy the Joyous 

because I'm going to send them all away but 
you. I can't have anyone around to excite her." 

So that night they watched together beside 
Aunt Hiley Ann. They spoke to each other of 
definite things in low, serious tones. 

" I have got to save her ; she's a good woman," 
said the doctor from Salt Lick. " The people 
need her." 

And Nancy, being a woman, answered, " I 
need her. She's been my friend." 

Along about midnight, as the doctor had fore- 
seen, the decisive crisis came. The fever which 
had been burning through the woman, dropped 
suddenly from high to below normal, accompa- 
nied by a collapse of exhausted nature. The 
doctor grew terse. 

'* We have got to work quickly now. The 
thing is to stimulate the heart action and keep 
up her temperature." 

So through the thick of the night they two 
fought death, he issuing his short orders and she 
following them unquestioningly. But still the 
old mountain woman lay without rallying. 

"No hope?" 

" Not much." 



Nancy the Joyous 125 

They fought on. 

" Have you ever seen anyone die? " 

" No." 

Nancy reached under the bedding. 
' This flask of water is growing cold. Shall 
I fill it again?" 

She crossed towards the fireplace where the 
iron kettle filled with water hung on its crane. 
He followed and halfway across the room took 
the flask out of her hand. 

' You go down to the spring and get me a 
pail of water." 

The spring was an eighth of a mile away along 
a rough trail. 

' You're just sending me away. I'm not 
going. I'm not afraid to stay." 

She took the bottle from him and refilled it 
from the kettle, using a gourd dipper and a 
funnel improvised out of stiff paper. 

Later, in reward for their efforts, the sick 
woman's temperature began to rise. She wak- 
ened from her stupor, smiled wearily and 
then quickly dropped off into a natural, restful 
sleep. 

Then Nancy began to tremble. 



126 Nancy the Joyous 

" There is nothing more to do now," said the 
doctor from Salt Lick. 

He drew Nancy towards the hearth so that the 
light from the flames burning upon it fell directly 
on her face and stood with both hands laid upon 
her shoulders. 

' You've got a smudge on your face," he com- 
mented. 

Nancy tried to smile but she was too tired. 

" She's safe if everything goes well. And 
you've been a brave girl. If it hadn't been for 
your care this past week I couldn't have done it. 
But don't do any more. They can nurse her 
now. I've got to save you for some more hard 
work. I'll call Marget as I ride by and send 
her here and then you go home to bed." 

Still holding her by the shoulders, he stood for 
a minute studying her. Then he took out his 
handkerchief and flicked the smudge off her face. 

" It's just some ashes." 




HE Bishop dropped in 
to call on Mrs. Crubb. 
" Have you heard from 
Nancy lately? " was al- 
most his first remark. 
There was enough of 
eagerness in it to suggest 
that it was the object of 
his visit. 

" Yes," returned Mrs. Crubb severely, " and 
I'd like to have you tell me more about this 
Schuyler woman. Are you sure she will take 
good care of Nancy? " 

" Oh, Miss Schuyler is pure gold; she is one of 
God's saints." 

" Well, my opinion is that God's saint is let- 
ting Nancy associate with people who are not 
proper for her to know. Take that Betsy Jane 
Skidmore person, for instance! I got worried 
for fear the saint hadn't good judgment and 
showed the letter to Mr. Williams. He used to 
know Miss Schuyler, and seems to think she is 

127 



128 Nancy the Joyous 

all right one of the finest women he ever knew. 
But that doesn't count for anything; you men all 
say that. Why, I dare say that when I'm gone 
you'll even be saying that I was one of the finest 
women you ever knew." 

" Heaven forbid," smiled the Bishop with a 
shake of the head. 

" Oh, I'm not such a bad sort," chuckled Mrs. 
Crubb with appreciation. 

' The thing that worries Mr. Williams," she 
continued, " is this young minister she keeps 
writing about. And I don't wonder ! ' It would 
be just like a silly, romantic-headed girl,' I told 
him, ' to fall in love with a penniless missionary 
and turn down a good chance like you. She's 
got it in her blood.' And probably God's saint 
would encourage her in it ! " 

" Oh, you people need not trouble yourselves 
about that. But the thing that worries me is hav- 
ing her ride around alone on that mule. Why, 
she might be thrown or " 

" Mule ! If you had ever seen her drive an auto 
downhill the way I have, you'd never worry about 
a mere mule. Don't be so foolish, Hubert; I'll 
guarantee that she can manage the mule." 



Nancy the Joyous 129 

" But I wish when you write her you'd warn 
her against being too venturesome. I have 
spoken of it but perhaps if you were " 

"Me! She'd never mind me. I'm only her 
aunt, you know, while she is some kind of make- 
believe daughter of yours. There isn't a girl in 
the city that would not have jumped at what I 
planned out for her, but I couldn't make her 
heed me. I hand it over to you now; perhaps 
you'll have better success." 

The Bishop was immediately on the defensive. 

" Nancy is a thoroughly dutiful, biddable girl. 
Only I wish she would be a little more cautious 
about the way she rides around," he allowed, ris- 
ing to take leave and at the same time feeling in 
his pocket to make sure that Mrs. Crubb had 
returned his last letter. 

It ran : 
Dear Bishop, 

It is no use trying; I can't make myself into a 
missionary. After I had Aunt Hiley Ann off my con- 
science I slept and slept. I would wake, drink a glass 
of milk and then sleep some more; until early the 
second morning I opened my eyes, suddenly wide awake. 
I felt newly made and more than that ; I wanted a good 



130 Nancy the Joyous 

time. It seemed as though there was a circus in town 
and I had no admission ticket. I knew that somewhere 
out in the crowded places of the world there were 
people just confessedly enjoying themselves; that there 
were, so to speak, the flap of flags, the blare of 
trumpets, the calls of the lemonade man, the jolly 
clown and the girl in tinsel riding horseback and throw- 
ing kisses to the crowd. At the thought of the girl I 
could stand Swaggerty no longer but mounted Wings 
and fled out of the valley and up the mountain-side. 
I think I had a vague notion that I might be able to 
find the tentful of happy people and at least get down 
on my knees and peek under the canvas at them. I 
could have wept at the picture of Nancy kneeling out 
alone in the mud and the peanut shucks. 

But morning was lovely on the mountain-top. It 
was wide and free like a great adventure; so I swung 
along taking my chance on strange trails and trusting 
to find my way home again. By mid-morning I was 
following a bridle path at the top of the ridge into a 
pocket lying so high that the headlands sloping down 
to it seemed only like little hills. The good soil had 
been mostly washed out of it. It lay ribbed with 
bleached hummocks of rocks so sharp that you could 
not walk on their backbones. Among these stood a set- 
tlement of four log houses. Scattered here and there 
wherever was a foothold of good soil, grew a few stools 
of corn. Compared with this place Swaggerty is a 



Nancy the Joyous 131 

flourishing city. Swaggerty is rising in my esteem. 

Before one of the cabins I slipped down out of my 
saddle. A mountain woman, Mittie Jeems, came out to 
tie my mule. After a parley of greetings I went to 
visit the other houses. As soon as a stranger was 
sighted, every woman, it seems, had started at a trot to 
prepare a dinner. At one place I found a meal waiting 
me set out on the table with one whole plate, two half 
plates and a tin tomato can. But I had promised to 
dine with Mittie Jeems. 

She, in the meantime, had made the most of this 
opportunity to trim up her house and family. I found 
her flock of children with their faces freshly washed and 
their hair tied with strips of calico. As for the house ! 
In it stood a table covered with an old sheet on which 
had been laid in state, surrounded with three postcards, 
the family hatchet. The eternal feminine longing for 
nicknacks ! 

If I could not dine with the folks of all four houses, 
they at least could gather round Mittie's door and 
watch me eat. It is disconcerting to have people stand 
by with interest and watch you chew, but I am growing 
used to it. And, then, that day we were all friends. 
They had, it seems, heard of me and some of them had 
seen me on the Fourth. Mittie said that she was " set- 
ting under a bush and my man came up to me and said, 
' Come here, Mittie, and jest hear this girl talk. Law, 
ain't she the talkin'est thing ! ' " which was intended 



132 Nancy the Joyous 

for a compliment. One rheumatic old fellow who moves 
with difficulty confided to me that he had followed me 
round all day to listen to what I said, and at leaving 
had told Aunt Hiley Ann that he was coming back 
again to Swaggerty because he'd " just natcherly got 
to hear that girl talk some more." 

The entire place dropped work and gave itself up to 
a gala day. The children took turns riding Wings. 
Then I taught them some games : " London Bridge " 
and " A Trisket, a Trasket, a Green and Yellow 
Basket." We had such genuine fun that their elders 
wanted to join in; so it was not long before the entire 
citizen body of the hamlet was holding hands and cir- 
cling round on the village common. When we were all 
tired I told them stories, with the children gathered up 
around my knees and their parents standing back in a 
wondering circle. 

When we left they all clustered round Wings and me, 
full of kindly helpfulness to get us started. 

One old woman, as she buckled the stirrup strap, 
said, " People must remember that we're just folks ; but 
we're always glad to have 'em come up and see us." 

As Mittie handed up my whip she said, " We've had 
a plumb pretty day. We'll all be talkin' and braggin* 
about it. There's poor folks, and folks that has; but 
I've noticed that them that has is the grippin'est. We 
was born poor and we s'pect to die poor and all we 
can get out of the world is satisfaction." 



Nancy the Joyous 133 

As I drew rein at the edge of the pocket to look back, 
I saw them standing there still, waving to me. 

You ask me to tell you how I should like to have you 
find my old friend David for me. Please don't. I have 
costumed him for such a variety of roles since my child- 
hood that I should not feel acquainted with him if he 
were to take substance and insist on looking always the 
same. You are doing nicely as a substitute. And 
please, dear Bishop, make Aunt Crubb understand that 
I meant every word in the letter I sent her. I asked 
her to try to forgive me, for I am truly sorry at the end 
of all her generosity to disappoint her in just the way 
my mother did. Aunt Crubb was so disgusted with 
mother that she would never talk with me about her; 
but I have a notion that David was the desirable party 
Aunt had selected for her. Tell her " we're just folks," 
all of us, and that " all we can get out of the world is 
satisfaction." If I had taken Mr. Williams without 
caring, whatever satisfaction I could get out of an 
Italian villa would be stolen. I would rather pick up 
what of it I can here in Swaggerty by honest effort. 

Nancy Lynn. 
August 15. 




ANCY'S next letter set 
the Bishop worrying 
from a different angle. 

" I don't like the first 
part of this letter," he 
muttered. " It is sweet 
and womanly but what I 
want is to keep her just 
a girl as long as I can. 
Dear, dear! Possibly Mrs. Crubb is right; per- 
haps it was a mistake to send her off where she 
is thrown so much on herself. 

" Anyway," he concluded, " I am glad there 
is a good doctor at hand. I think I shall have to 
drop him a note and ask him to keep an eye on 
her." 

Then he reread: 

Dear Bishop, 

I do believe you are worrying about me. You warn 
me against riding off alone and I think I detect an un- 
bishoply desire to go out and fight my David. My 
coat-of-arms is now a bishop rampant in an azure field. 

134 



Nancy the Joyous 135 

The magic of life here is that it strips from one all 
that is trivial, like the foolish little leaves the trees have 
done with and shed. That gives the big things space 
in which to be. My love for just a few of you out 
there I count the big things of life. The thought that 
off alone in the world there is someone facing the weight 
of each day bravely silent, just as I am trying to face 
each day bravely here, is more precious to me now than 
any touch of hands or lips. One can do without those ; 
I have learned to. But I don't think I could ever again 
live without the silent, steadying love which keeps a girl 
like me all day joyfully at unpleasant tasks and sends 
her singing to bed at night because 

Nonsense ! What I meant to say was that Saturday 
I went with Aunt Hiley Ann, Uncle Lemmie and some 
of their kin to an all-day preaching. We drove up 
the creek bottom in a buckboard filled with straight- 
backed, splint chairs, then turned at an angle; and by 
digging their hoofs in, the mules succeeded in dragging 
us through what looked like the washout of a spring 
freshet. To me that pair of mules was accomplishing 
an astounding feat, but this aspect of the situation did 
not appeal to Aunt Hiley Ann. She leaned back in her 
splint chair, dipping snuff and gazing round on her 
buckboard of kinfolk with an automobile expression of 
pleased proprietorship. 

When the mules scrambled up with us over the top 
of the ridge, there, facing a dip of open ground, yet 



136 Nancy the Joyous 

backing into the trees that rose behind it, stood a little 
plank meetinghouse, unadorned and looking like one of 
the sanctified, humble poor. It was a lonesome little 
structure. Just then, however, it wore an expression 
of restrained and pious festivity. Four or five buck- 
boards flanked it ; horses and mules stood hitched about, 
with their saddles empty and their harness hanging 
looped; from within it came a droning sound, for 
preaching had already begun. Inside it was bare, un- 
painted and time-stained. The men, grizzled and 
scraggy, sat on one side ; on the other the women, rang- 
ing all the way from soft girlhood to the drooping chin 
and cheek muscles of old age. A wood stove in a shal- 
low, tray-like box, occupied the center of the floor. 
High up against either wall, perched there on wooden 
brackets, stood a chimney-less kerosene lamp of the 
size known as bedroom lamps, the wall about each 
smoked in a fan-shape to a rich ebony. Seated in front, 
behind a rail not unlike an elevated foot-bench, were 
eight solemn, opinionated, ignorant exhorters, who 
snorted, wheezed, puffed and agonized in turn. Before 
them on the railing stood a tin bucket of water and a 
gourd towards which flowed steadily a little line from 
the congregation. 

Aunt Hiley Ann went click-clacking in her brogans 
up to a seat on the far, holy side of the wood stove. I 
followed, tiptoeing reverently. 

Soon we were all swaying on our benches and singing 



Nancy the Joyous 137 

through our noses with a melancholy lilt and sob of the 
voice : 



" Conceived in sin (O wretched state !) 

Before we draw our breath, 
The first young pulse begins to beat 
Iniquity and death " 

One woman suddenly gave forth a piercing shriek 
that loosened her back hair; she leaped into the air off 
both feet and clapped her hands together high above 
her head. For a full minute she kept up a shriek and 
a leap, a shriek and a leap, like a good working engine ; 
until, quite as suddenly, she sat down to receive the 
congratulations of her friends. 

My interest in this performance was so genuine and 
unfeigned that the youngest exhorter, a really brainy, 
good-looking, lithely graceful young fellow, thought 
that I, too, hung on the verge of " an experience of 
grace." Later, when we went out on the grounds to eat 
dinner and he joined the circle of Aunt Hiley Ann's 
kinfolk, I felt that my soul was being stalked like game. 

When for the time being we laid aside religion like a 
cloak and the all-day preaching settled down to its 
dinner, corn pones, fried chicken, four-story apple 
pies, strewed the ground like autumn leaves; and the 
kin belonging to the different connections were gathered 
up as though in windswept circles around different 



138 Nancy the Joyous 

centers of bounty. But such is mountaineer hospitality 
that the stranger in their midst is provided with food 
from every basket. One could not offend by refusing 
their tentatively offered gifts. Rather the stomach 
ache than hurt one of their simple, generous hearts ! 
So first came my bounden duty to Aunt Hiley Ann. I 
took that sitting on a rock near her kin. Then they 
began to levy on all the other baskets on the grounds 
to satisfy what they must have considered an all-con- 
suming appetite. I stood with my back against a pine 
tree and bravely found room for choice bits of chicken, 
slices of boiled ham and hunks of corn bread. The 
young exhorter stood by and watched me with a stead- 
ily growing interest and respect. I was struggling with 
a great, juice-soaked section of dried-apple pie, a big, 
limp triangle which gave in the middle when you 
grasped it in both hands by the sides, and when you 
braced its center with the palm of your hand, sprinkled 
juice down on you from its edges. I had been consider- 
ing its engineering possibilities and had concluded the 
only way was to take it boldly like a dive into deep 
water, when I felt someone's eyes fastened compellingly 
on me; and looking across the heads of the seated 
people, I saw the doctor from Salt Lick leaning against 
his horse, grinning with silent mirth. A sudden anger 
burned up through me. He recognized this but it only 
amused him the more. Away fled my former considera- 
tion for the people. I gave that piece of pie a level 



Nancy the Joyous 139 

fling which sent it skimming into the pawpaw bushes. 
Then my sense of humor came to the rescue. My 
fingers were sticky with apple juice and I had lost my 
handkerchief. There was nothing to do except put 
them in my mouth like a schoolgirl, but he crossed 
through the people and considerately offered me the use 
of his handkerchief. 

When we climbed into our buckboard and started 
home, we discovered the young mountain preacher rid- 
ing alongside. Aunt Hiley Ann's automobile face was 
transported to aeroplane pride, for this was a great 
distinction. With Alexander MacDonald, I now have 
two men holding flirtations with my soul. 

Write me whenever you can, friend o' mine. On 
days when the mail is brought into our settlement I go 
out to the road with my throat tickling and a hollow 
ache in my chest. I come up close beside the carrier's 
horse and follow the handwriting on the envelopes that 
he shuffles, so I know, even before he hands them down 
to me, what letters have not come. Perhaps there is 
one I have greatly hoped to get, and my heart whispers 
up to me that this time it has come. Yours are always 
welcome. 

Loyally, 

Nancy. 
September 4. 




OR some time back Alec 
MacDonald had been 
prophesying the visit of a 
sister in whom Nancy was 
to find a " Soul Compan- 
ion." Nancy thought 
probably she would like 
her. She thought it, 
however, without much 
enthusiasm, because she and Miss Schuyler were 
too busy to think of much aside from Swaggerty 
and its needs. 

Then he sent word that she had come ! 
" Do you catch the huzzahs ringing through 
it? " suggested Nancy as she read the note over 
Miss Schuyler's shoulder. 

Swaggerty, so he planned, was to hold an 
all-day picnic for her in a cave on one of the 
mountain-sides. " Knowing how busy you two 
are," he wrote, " I have asked her to make a 
cake, some sandwiches and some deviled eggs 
for the general dinner." 

140 



Nancy the Joyous 141 

They spread the news and the settlement was 
delighted. It was a busy season but they finally 
arranged for Jock, a lean youth with the hook- 
worm, to ride Wings over for her and walk back 
himself. 

It was dusk when the Soul Companion 
arrived. They had been watching and ran out 
to the road to meet her. Through the twilight 
they spied on Wings' back a dump, squat vision 
under a big hat trimmed with a collection of 
artificial flowers. Otherwise she was all in white, 
even to her shoes. 

Nancy grasped Miss Schuyler's arm. 

" Spy the shoes," she whispered. 

Miss Schuyler was more dignified but none the 
less concerned. 

" I do hope she has brought others to wear 
to the cave. I suggested what she had better 
wear." 

Meanwhile Miss Schuyler had introduced her- 
self and the affinity whined something from 
Wings' back. She permitted Jock, the youth 
with hookworm, to lift her down bodily, and fol- 
lowed them inside. 

With a stranger beside her, Nancy seemed to 



142 Nancy the Joyous 

look about upon the little cabin with a clearer 
focus. 

" Isn't this a beautiful little nest? " she asked 
lovingly. 

Blouzabella that was not her name but by 
that time Nancy had presented her with it 
merely remarked by way of reply : 

" Did you notice how interested Jock was in 
everything I said? " 

They had on their pantry shelf a can of 
lobster and a can of oysters. The oysters they 
had planned to offer up in the form of a stew. 

" I propose," threatened Nancy, when they 
had a minute alone, " that we go right out on 
the wood-pile and eat them up." 

" Your Blouzabella," stated Miss Schuyler, 
" is the kind that has never had any attraction 
for men and feels, as the years come along to 
her, that her last feeble grip on them is slipping. 
She takes no interest in women and is too selfish 
to pretend any." 

" And she acts as though this were a hotel and 
we were the dining room girls," added Nancy. 
" If she gives me a tip I promise to put it in the 
collection." 



Nancy the Joyous 143 

Miss Schuyler relented and served the oysters. 
One cannot comprehend the magnitude of this 
generosity until he has lived forty-five miles 
from the railroad. After Blouzabella had them 
nearly eaten, she announced, sotto voce, that she 
had changed her mind and did not care to go to 
the cave after all. 

Miss Schuyler grew stern. 

" You will have to," she said. ' You cannot 
disappoint the people." 

When they had got Nancy's soul-mate to bed 
they sat down and looked into each other's eyes. 
A wrathful missionary is a very human thing. 
Miss Schuyler declared she would make Blouza- 
bella work, and Nancy, remembering " how inter- 
ested Jock was in everything I said," vowed as 
soon as Blouzabella got her eyes fastened on a 
man to swoop down like an eagle and carry him 
off. 

The next morning she kept breakfast waiting 
an hour and then she appeared in white, some- 
what soiled by yesterday's trip on Wings, with a 
pompadour as big as a bolster. 

They had been so busy papering Aunt Hiley 
Ann's cabin with old newspapers that they had 



144 Nancy the Joyous 

worked on until " lightin' time," counting on 
Blouzabella's offerings for part of the picnic 
dinner. At breakfast they discovered that she 
had not brought a thing. Meanwhile, Swag- 
gerty, being early risers, had been ready and wait- 
ing none too patiently to start for some three 
hours. 

Miss Schuyler, true to her word, set her to 
making sandwiches. Then, when they got out 
into the road and Blouzabella inquired if there 
was not something she could help carry, in that 
tone that implies of course there is not, the quiet 
missionary handed her a lantern with a tendency 
to drip kerosene. 

They left the cabin with eight in the party but 
by the time they reached the mountain there were 
forty. First Marget and her brood joined. 
Then they came along to the gully that led up 
to Betsy Jane Skidmore's and found her sitting 
along by the road edge. Betsy Jane had not 
planned to go but the sight of them on their way 
proved too great a temptation. She rose to her 
feet and did some effective shouting up the 
gorge in regard to her change of plans. They 
next came to some men laying pump-logs down 



Nancy the Joyous 145 

the slope, who had not heard the news of the 
picnic, so all stopped and explained where they 
were going. The men laying pump-logs con- 
cluded to join in. There was a man by the road- 
side hewing out runners for a sled, but he decided 
that he might as well go along too. So the crowd 
grew. 

All along the way the men were speechless at 
Blouzabella's whiteness, but when she began to 
pick her way across the soggy creek-bottom, the 
humor of it came to them. 

'What do you think of her gyarments?" 
Nancy overheard one man remark. 

" I suppose we'll have to take her in," sug- 
gested a man tentatively to another at the mouth 
of the cave. 

The throat of the cave was not only covered 
with slime, but there were places where one had 
to get down on one's knees and crawl. 

" I'd hate to get her clo'es muddied," 
drawled the other. 

Its entrance was large, like a room; but soon 
came a little arch not unlike the door of a dog 
kennel. Here one had to creep for some dis- 
tance. By the time the last ray of daylight was 



146 Nancy the Joyous 

left behind it was just a big cleft deep in the 
earth, wide and high above but narrow and rough 
round one's feet, which led up hill and down in 
the dark. Far in one came up against a smooth, 
perpendicular wall like a closed door, up whose 
face one must somehow mount. Then the same 
cleft went on at a higher level. They carried 
torches of red cedar, their flames lighting up the 
white crystal walls. A film of water trickled 
over them in places, glistening; and pendants 
like chandeliers hung overhead. 

It had been difficult to mount that smooth, 
upright rock; but dropping down it was even 
harder. Two of the men discovered places to 
brace their backs against the side walls of the 
cave and so were able to set their feet against the 
face of the rock. Down these Nancy walked as 
down a flight of stairs. No trained society man 
could have found gentler ways of showing her 
consideration than these rude mountaineers. 

" And out there at the mouth of the cave sits 
Blouzabella sniffing down on Swaggerty Valley," 
thought Nancy in a passion of protest. 

She was still voicing this sentiment when she 
returned home. Miss Schuyler had preceded 



Nancy the Joyous 147 

her; Blouzabella had departed on Wings and 
they once more had the little house to themselves. 

" And I shall have to spend the next three 
days wandering around among the cabins prais- 
ing Mr. MacDonald so as to make sure her un- 
popularity does not injure his influence. And 
by that time," cried Nancy in mock despair, 
" they will be * plumb sure ' I've fixed my love on 
him." 

" Swaggerty has satisfied you, hasn't it, dear? 
There is no other place you'd rather be just 
now? " 

" China." 

Miss Schuyler smiled. 

" No, seriously." 

" Seriously," returned Nancy cheerfully. 

They ate their simple supper. Then Nancy 
discovered a package of mail that had been left 
for them during the morning. She tossed it 
on the table between them and began sorting it. 

" You have a letter from the Bishop," she com- 
mented handing Miss Schuyler a fat envelope. 

Miss Schuyler slit the envelope with a hairpin 
and carefully readjusted the pin in place. Then 
she began perusing her letter, reading discon- 



148 Nancy the Joyous 

nected phrases aloud after a habit she had 
formed during lonely years as a mission worker. 

" May arrange for you to come north for a 
few months lecture about among churches 
such a change would do you good thank 
you " 

These snatches of words were from her Bishop, 
so Nancy stood listening to them. She and Miss 
Schuyler shared a common life together. 

The reader turned a page and went on mur- 
muring, " Knew you would be interested one 
of the highest honors conf errable has been 
transferred from China considerable personal 
danger intrigues " 

" Some missionary? " 

" No; a friend of the Bishop's in the consular 
service." 

Miss Schuyler laid down the sheet and picked 
up from the table a letter that had been enclosed 
with it. The heavy, round handwriting that cov- 
ered the paper was as familiar to Nancy Lynn as 
though it had been John Carter's face. 

" Been transferred from China one of the 
highest honors conf errable considerable per- 
sonal danger " the words ran through Nancy's 



Nancy the Joyous 149 

brain, and yet she asked no question. When she 
found herself spelling out the sheet from across 
the room, she shuddered and dropped her eyes. 
For a strange, new crisis had come to Nancy. 
Those Puritan relatives that had brought her up, 
those birds of drab wing at whom the mirth-loving 
Nancy Lynn had mocked, at last claimed her as 
one of their own. Their blood ran in her veins 
and hers began now to beat to the measures of 
their pulses. Nancy Lynn knew that even 
though she lived in the house with one who could 
inform her, no questions concerning John Carter 
would ever pass her lips. It would only be tak- 
ing down the barriers she had been so long in 
rearing and she would have to begin the long 
struggle over. Then here the Puritan in her 
was strong she had given the Crusty Old Per- 
son her promise that once for all she was done 
with John Carter. 

Miss Schuyler was long cruelly long 
in reading the letter but at last she laid it down 
on the table between them. Nancy picked up 
her own mail and attempted to lose herself in 
it ; but whenever she turned her head which 
was repeatedly that sheet with its bold, firm 



150 Nancy the Joyous 

script struck her like a blinding flash of white 
light from an electric wire. She winced 
physically. 

The Puritan in Nancy was still only a little 
naked, fledgeling bird. It had not yet grown 
strong in fortitude. She felt passionately that 
it was not possible for her to live in the same 
house with that letter. With a sudden impulse 
for self preservation she laid her hand down over 
it, crumpling it up into her palm. 

' You don't want that any more," she said 
with a piteous little attempt at nonchalance, and 
crossing to the hearth, dropped the paper on the 
embers. She turned her back so as not to see it 
burn. 

:< Uh?" murmured Miss Schuyler without 
looking up. 

That night Nancy Lynn, chill of body, lay 
awake and gazed wide-eyed into the dark. 
Transferred from China. Gone. Gone where? 
It was so like death. She remembered how when 
a little child she had been told that her father 
and her mother were " gone." 

At length she fell asleep and dreamed that 
she was again a lonely little child without com- 



Nancy the Joyous 151 

panionship, swinging on Cousin Sarah Sperry's 
gate and watching down the road for David to 
come for her. 

The next morning when she knelt on the fire- 
stone to brush up the hearth she found among 
the ashes a charred scrap of paper on which John 
Carter's hand had written " Tibet." 



A 




ND so you ha.ve planned 
for Miss Schuyler to 
come out on a three 
months' leave and for 
Nancy to stay in there 
as her substitute ! " ex- 
claimed Mrs. Crubb. 

" No, I can't say that I 
planned it. They planned 
it between them. But after looking at the mat- 
ter from all sides, I have agreed to it." 

" You may call it safe to leave a young girl 
all alone back in that nest of moonshiners, but 
I consider it distinctly imprudent. All alone f 
remember! Suppose she should be taken sick! " 
" There is a good doctor within reach. You 
forget, Mrs. Crubb, that we have a number of 
women and girls working that way through the 
mountain regions." 

Mrs. Crubb sniffed contemptuously. 
* Yes ; lean souls with no thought except to 
work out their road-tax to Heaven." 

152 



Nancy the Joyous 153 

" Noble women," corrected the Bishop. 

" But Nancy isn't a noble woman. That is 
just where the danger lies. She's all fire and 
spirit and she's beautiful beautiful ! Perhaps 
you have never noticed it, but she is. And there 
is something about her I don't know what 
but there is certainly something about that girl 
that turns people's heads. Why, my good man, 
she has yours turned clean around. That is the 
thing that makes it so unsafe for her. I tell you 
that to leave that kind of a girl in there unpro- 
tected is nothing more nor less than tempt- 
ing not Providence it's tempting the devil 
himself." 

The world, including the Bishop, was in the 
habit of accepting extremes from the hands of 
Mrs. Crubb ; but now his spirit, which was quies- 
cent rather than acquiescent in the presence of 
his hardy old friend, straightened its shoulders. 

' You refer to her personal safety. Certainly 
I did not give my consent for her to stay in there 
during Miss Schuyler's absence until I had care- 
fully investigated that. She wants to do it and the 
doctor assures me that she is in no slightest per- 
sonal danger. Miss Schuyler writes that Nancy 



154 Nancy the Joyous 

is absolutely safe in Swaggerty; that she holds 
the whole valley in the hollow of her hand; that 
there is not a man in it who would not fight to 
protect her. Nancy herself says, ' They regard 
me as a kind of civic possession. When we are 
alone they treat me like a pampered child. 
Before the neighboring settlements they wear 
me proudly on their front like a filigree breast- 
pin.' " 

" I can't see why she should want to stay." 

" She writes that it is because she has seen the 
light on the morning hills." 

" Humph ! If you think this whim of hers to 
play missionary-substitute is an outward and 
visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, 
you are mistaken. She's just got a hankering to 
try it. I discovered while I had her here that 
she is a regular tea-taster of life. Why, it was 
all I could do to keep her from talking to the 
butler. No, my dear sir, the idea of staying 
appeals to her sporting blood. She's starting 
out to do it just as most people start to a ball 
game." 

The Bishop read from a letter he took out 
of his pocket: 



Nancy the Joyous 155 

" ' I want to fill in my days with work, work, 
work, until at night I am so tired I slip into 
bed, turn over with my face in my arms and 
fall asleep without a thought.' That does not 
sound much like play." 

" No," agreed Mrs. Crubb. Then she burst 
forth vehemently, " And I suppose you wrote 
her to put on the whole armor and work her- 
self to death." 

The Bishop looked conscious. 

"I did quote " 

"Of course you quoted it! Don't I know! 
But, my good friend, if you think the whole 
armor was built to fit a girl like my niece, you're 
wrong. Why, she's wearing a twenty dollar 
corset this minute and the whole armor wasn't 
designed on those lines. Nancy Lynn is satu- 
rated with the love of luxury, mockery, original- 
ity; that's why she is so refreshing; that's why 
I like the girl. This whim won't last. I'd be 
willing to wager that right now she is sitting 
out somewhere in the sun with the helmet cocked 
down over one eye, beating a tattoo on the front 
of the breastplate and singing college songs." 

Mrs. Crubb's voice caught impatiently. 



156 Nancy the Joyous 

"And here I've been planning that it was 
getting time for her to come home. I had even 
got to the point of saying that if nothing but 
that young minister in there would suit her, to 
bring him along." 

" It seems to me your head is turned, too," 
smiled the Bishop. 

" No, it isn't," dissented Mrs. Crubb. " But 
sometimes I think she has given it a bit of a 
twist." 

Now that she had been disarmed, Mrs. 
Crubb's voice took on a note of personal 
grievance. 

" She's taken up solid reading. She wrote me 
to send her all the books, magazines, and news- 
papers I could find that contained anything 
about Tibet. Tibet! Think of a girl as pretty 
as Nancy Lynn taking to solid reading! " 

"Tibet? That's a strange subject to choose; 
but I think it is a good idea for her to do some 
reading. It will keep her from being lonesome." 

The Bishop took a memorandum book out of 
his pocket and wrote in it : 

"Nancy Tibet." 




RS. CRUBB was mis- 
taken. Nancy was not sit- 
ting out in the sunshine 
humming popular airs. 
Rather, when the respon- 
sibility she had assumed 
actually fell on her 
shoulders, she was so 
overpowered by it that 
the temptation was just to curl up her fingers in 
her lap and look down at them helplessly. 

But she could not sit and curl her fingers. 
Only the very rich or the very poor can do that. 
What Nancy had pledged herself to was not a 
life of idleness. Day varied from day, but the 
duties of one of them, for example, ran thus : In 
the morning she slipped out of bed without a mur- 
mur at half past five; did the housework; enter- 
tained a Primitive Baptist minister who called 
" to have some Christian conversations " ; rushed 
down at Uncle Lemmie's earnest solicitation just 
in time to prevent Aunt Hiley Ann from eating 

157 



158 Nancy the Joyous 

beans, which didn't agree with her; walked two 
miles down the valley to make a missionary call ; 
and climbed the gully on the way home to do up 
Betsy Jane Skidmore's chest in mustard. The 
waning of that afternoon was spent in making 
out mission reports. Nancy sighed laboriously 
over these. 

" It aways makes my back itch to add." 

On one of these busy mornings Nancy was 
resting along the way three miles down the road 
when the carrier came riding up the valley with 
the mail. 

" Howdy," called up Nancy in local parlance. 

" Howdy," responded the man, reining in his 
mule. " Will you have your mail here, Miss 
Nancy, or shall I carry it along for you? " 

" What have I? " she asked curiously, coming 
up close to the mule's side. 

" Oh, right smart," he answered, drawing out 
of his saddlebags her letters and a large package. 

" I'll take them here," decided Nancy. 
" Somebody will be going along my way and 
carry them for me." 

" 'Bye," she called after the man. 

" 'Bye," he answered. 



Nancy the Joyous 159 

Nancy seated herself along the highway and 
undid her package. It contained the books on 
Tibet sent in by the Bishop. She looked at their 
titles and then, without choosing among them, 
picked up the volume that lay uppermost on her 
lap and began to read. There was no need to 
choose, for she knew that she would devour every 
word of every book. The sun swung in an arch 
through the sky towards its afternoon time of 
shadows, but Nancy took no heed of the hours. 
She was no longer among the green mountains 
of Tennessee with their lines patted round and 
smooth by God's hand as little children pat their 
sand hills. She was a hemisphere away where the 
crowded, unspeakable mountains of Tibet rear 
themselves out of infinite abysses. With heart 
and brain functioning together as is the way 
with women Nancy gathered bits here and 
there from the pages and fitted these together. 
She caught the glint of sunlight on lofty, per- 
petual snows. She peered down over mountain 
precipices into purple voids where no foot of man 
could penetrate. On her shoulders she felt flay- 
ing winds that focus in the high passes and spread 
out again on the plateaus into sudden, gusty 



160 Nancy the Joyous 

storms that hurl one from one's feet. And 
because the man she loved was there, it seemed to 
her of all lands the most desirable. She pictured 
herself on its high, waste moors where stolid, cred- 
ulous little folk shift their black tents ; in the cow- 
herders' villages of three or four mud hovels built 
on the lip of some tremendous precipice. She 
wandered the stone-built towns where the fanati- 
cal priesthood has collected the sparse w r ealth of 
the country. She followed beside the traders 
driving down to India and China their flocks of 
tiny sheep, each bearing its little sack of borax 
or wool or gold dust. The Crusty Old Person 
might pledge the lips of Nancy Lynn to silence 
but not Heaven itself could keep the loyal heart 
of her from following him whom she loved. 

Among the letters which lay unread in Nancy's 
lap was one addressed in the Bishop's fine, dis- 
membered, clerical hand. It was high noon 
before she turned from the printed pages long 
enough to open this. She did so dutifully but, it 
must be conceded, with just a shade of impa- 
tience. Forgive her the disloyalty. She was a 
far traveler that day. The Bishop commended 
her resolution to do some sound reading and 



Nancy the Joyous 161 

trusted that she would find her chosen subject 
interesting. Then, in order that she might get 
a better grasp of it, he painstakingly outlined 
for her the actual, existing political situation of 
Tibet. In doing so, he explained, he was trusting 
her with certain unpublished, inside information 
with which he had recently been favored, as 
he thought she would find these facts helpful and 
illuminating. Nancy did find them illuminating. 
It was at this point that she grasped the Bishop's 
letter with both hands. 

Over the vast, isolated country of Tibet, China 
exercises suzerainty. However much China may 
be torn by internal strife, the warring factions 
recognize that it must still keep its hand heavy 
upon Tibet, because here is a long monopolized 
market for its merchandise. But other powers 
have sniffed in it the scent of a new bone. China 
is suspicious of the interest of Russia, which 
hangs like a vague black shape along the border 
of Tibet. She resents the intrusions of the Eng- 
lish. So up into that remote, hidden country 
China has sent a little company of men so to 
shape affairs for her that when the crisis comes 
she will be ready to meet the clash of events. 



162 Nancy the Joyous 

These are two governors with their staffs, who 
supervise Tibetan military and foreign matters. 
And since the great arch-enemy of China is the 
slowly encroaching British, it is necessary for 
this band of workers to include someone who can 
interpret events from the occidental viewpoint. 
Therefore they have taken along with them a 
young American, a former under-secretary of the 
legation at Peking, who has severed his diplo- 
matic connections and comes as a private citizen. 
He is a quiet, earnest, thorough man by the name 
of Carter, who has burst his chrysalis, as quiet, 
earnest, thorough young men sometimes do, and 
stands revealed to a small inner circle as a man 
with the wings of ability. 

It was late in the afternoon when Reverend 
Alec MacDonald rode by and found Nancy 
still sitting by the roadside. When, in response 
to his greeting, she rose and came out into the 
highway, she staggered a little as though she were 
just emerging from a deep dream. Her face was 
pale from the long strain of concentrated read- 
ing, but her eyes were luminous. 

The world does not realize to what an extent 
the spirit of motherhood in some of its secondary 



Nancy the Joyous 163 

forms is the prompting motive of its women. 
Nancy Lynn was rejoicing that she had made 
the sacrifice and given this man to the times. 
This was the radiance that shone out from her 
face. 

" Why, what has happened ! " exclaimed Alec 
MacDonald. 

Nancy reached out her hand and stroked the 
horse's neck. One does not hurry in the telling 
of such news. An inward light it was far 
more than a smile trembled upward across her 
face from her lips. 

" I have just been presented at court," she 
answered softly. 

" What do you mean by that? " 

" I mean that I have just learned," she an^ 
swered slowly, " that someone I once knew has a 
voice in the making of nations." 

Alec MacDonald blanched. 

" Is it someone you care for? " 

Nancy rubbed her hand along the satin of the 
horse's neck, smiling softly at the childishness of 
the phrase. Then she lifted her eyes and looked 
them full into his. 

" It is someone I love." 



164 Nancy the Joyous 

Alec MacDonald gripped the pommel of his 
saddle until his knuckles turned white. 

" Good-bye," he said, lifting his hat; and rode 
on. 



Dear Doc, 

Your letter deserved to have been answered 
some time back but you know yourself how such 
things go. Since hearing from you I have moved 
back into the interior. Am now in Tibet. For 
awhile at first this high altitude keeps the low- 
lander lying night after night wide awake in his 
bed. When a man strikes half a dozen such 
nights on a stretch out here in the east, it sets him 
thinking about home. How you big-brothered 
me when you were an upper classman and I was 
nothing but a heady young cub. The Lord 
knows why you did it. 

Thanks for your congratulations. Same to 
you for I hear that you are doing things in 
your Tennessee mountains. Some of us can't 
help feeling that you are hiding your light, for 

165 



166 Nancy the Joyous 

you were the biggest man in the round-up. But 
you know best, of course. 

I am here as an unofficial member of the staff 
of the Chinese governor at Shigatse. Picture 
your friend Carter living a life of imperial mag- 
nificence. My section of the palace is more like 
stage setting for light opera than a man's living 
quarters. I don't think that I should be much 
surprised if at any time a curtain should ring 
up and I found myself standing before an audi- 
ence with the orchestra below working away for 
dear life. 

The only person that could really appreciate 
this place would be some nice, fresh-hearted 
American girl, the sort of girl the Lord makes 
only in the States, the kind that would be out- 
wardly a bit prideful but inwardly amused by 
it. And if He were in a particularly gracious 
mood, He'd give her brown hair and blue eyes, 
for I'm dead sick of sleek little black heads eter- 
nally salaaming. The most mercenary Ameri- 
can girl I ever met at least stood straight up on 
her feet. Take my word for it, Doc, and make 
the most of the blessings at hand. If by any far 
chance one of them should wander into Tibet, I 



Nancy the Joyous 167 

foresee that there are spells when, resolutions to 
the contrary, I'm hers for the taking. 

But, joking aside, I don't know when I shall 
be able to set foot back there with you again. 
Sometime, I hope. Good luck to you. 

Cordially, 

John Carter. 




ANCY saw the doctor 
from Salt Lick every day 
or so. Whenever he was 
called east into the moun- 
tains he rode there by the 
way of Swaggerty Val- 
ley. She knew when he 
was coming by a clatter 
of hoofs down the road, 
for he always rode at breakneck speed. He kept 
three horses and sometimes was scarcely off them 
for days, catching snatches of sleep in the saddle. 
When he was very hurried he stopped only long 
enough for a minute's talk from horseback. 
Other days he had time to sit on the doorstep 
awhile; and when he was very tired they went 
inside and made coffee. Then Nancy had the 
feeling of being at a party, he was so alive and 
companionable. There was something about this 
doctor from Salt Lick that converted her into a 
listener. As he told her from day to day the 
humorous experiences of his practice, she sat 

168 



Nancy the Joyous 169 

looking at him with lips apart like a child's and 
eyes steady with wonder, for underneath his jest- 
ing she caught the same seriousness that she had 
found in all the outsiders that lived in here. 

' They are all wrestling with the angel," she 
thought. 

Shortly after the settlement was left to 
fancy's care the doctor rode over to see how she 
was getting on as a missionary. He came pre- 
pared to scold her in case she had lost her nerve. 

He found Swaggerty full of civic happenings. 
Aunt Hiley Ann had her brass kettle boiling 
over a wood fire beside the creek, doing some 
dyeing. It was such a good opportunity that the 
entire settlement had brought articles to be 
dipped and these hung about her over the heads 
of the bushes. There was another center of ex- 
citement down the road apiece where the Jeems 
family was holding a house-raising. 

" Ten by twelve and there are only three in 
the family," cried Nancy palatially. Her enthu- 
siasm was genuine. 

" Then, too," she gossiped, " Old Man Devin 
has moved his cow from his east pasture lot to his 
lot at the west of the settlement. I have been in 



170 Nancy the Joyous 

here so long now that it requires concentration 
for me to realize that the President's trip is any- 
where near as important as this journey of the 
Devin cow." 

She raked the coals of the fireplace forward on 
the hearthstone into a hot bed of embers and set 
the kettle in them to boil. Then she rose from 
her knees and faced him. 

" Two years ago, if anyone had told me that 
the land of my heart would be just a knot of 
smoky log houses with chimneys biasing up one 
gable end, that I'd get down on my knees to 
show the women how to scrub the floor, and 
snuggle and sing lullabies to babies dressed in 
unspeakable red calico, with my heart just break- 
ing with pity, I should have called it a horrible 
dream and tried to pinch myself awake. Now 
I feel that I am beginning to discern the durable 
satisfactions of life." 

" And if anyone had told me, back in medical 
school, what my practice was to be, I think I 
would have thrown it up and been a professional 
pitcher. Take the patient I have on my hands 
now over on Indian Back. That girl had the 
toothache, so her father took a hammer and a 



Nancy the Joyous 171 

shingle nail and knocked the tooth out. The 
folks over there consider the extraction an entire 
success, but I'm afraid the girl is going to die." 

" How did you happen to settle in here? " she 
asked. 

He explained simply how it had started from 
hunting trips; but as he realized the ignorance 
of the section, he could not escape the feeling 
of its need of his profession. 

" If you stay in here long enough you won't be 
able to leave, either. But I am going to send 
you out for the holidays," he said, a note of 
seriousness coloring his voice. 

" By what authority? " 

" Oh, I have the authority; I've been told to 
take care of you." 

She was still sitting at the table from which 
she had been serving him coffee. Nancy rested 
her elbows on it and slipped her chin into the 
cup made by the palms of her hands. She 
scanned him mockingly. 

" Then you must be my David. Can it be pos- 
sible that I am to find David in Swaggerty? " 

"Who is he?" 

Nancy related to him the little story of this 



172 Nancy the Joyous 

friend of her childhood, her face growing wistful 
as she talked. The doctor from Salt Lick appre- 
ciated as he watched her that this legendary per- 
son was woven more closely through the fibre of 
her thoughts than the girl herself realized. He 
rose and turned slightly from her. 

" No ; I don't think David is quite the role to 
suit me. 

" Nevertheless," he added in his positive way, 
turning towards her again, " I have had orders to 
take care of you and so I am going to send you 
out for the holidays." 

"Why?" 

' Well, for one reason, it isn't fair for us 
people in here to take advantage of you. Such 
a thing might happen. You say that you are 
growing to like us and our mountains you see, 
I've amalgamated; I am part of it now. That 
may be only because of your gift of adaptability. 
It may be just because you are shut in with us 
so far off from the rest of the world. We 
mustn't be unfair to you. Go back, little girl, 
and renew your standards of comparison and 
then come again and judge us. That is only 
being honest with you." 



Nancy the Joyous 173 

" But my affections are not matters of com- 
parison." 

" Nevertheless," he insisted, " I think you 
should go. For another reason, there is none of 
the Christmas spirit in here ; and it would be too 
bad for a girl like you to lose that out of the 
year." 

He went on to explain at length the nature of 
the Christmas they keep back in the mountain. 
He pictured to her how only ten years ago this 
whole belt of country was a hotbed of moonshin- 
ing, with her own settlement as its focal point. 
Even in broad noonday the stranger who had to 
cross the county gave Swaggerty a wide berth, 
making a long detour of other roads rather than 
ride through this valley. The revenue officers 
came in squads of six or eight with some one 
of the Swaggerty folk captured and carried 
along as a protection against bullets fired down 
on them on a chance from the mountain-sides. 

He told her how at holiday time the old moon- 
shine spirit always broke out. They would bring 
in quantities of Christmas whiskey which they 
referred to metaphorically as " Old Corn." He 
told of such pranks as capturing folks and leav- 



174 Nancy the Joyous 

ing them tied all night to a tree on the mountain- 
top, of dragging people out of their beds and 
making them dance in the road while the " pr ank- 
ers " stood around in a circle and shot their 
" Christmas guns." 

' Then that is all the more reason for me to 
stay and show them what a real Christmas is," 
insisted Nancy. 

She rose and began moving about the room. 

" I'd like to spend the holidays with the 
Bishop and Aunt Crubb. As Betsy Jane says, 
' If I had my ruthers, I'd ruther.' " 

She threw out both hands with that quick little 
gesture of hers. 

" It seems wrong not to end the year in a blaze 
of candles and carols and Christmas greens; of 
white tissue paper and evening dresses and light- 
hearted people talking all at once. What I 
should like would be Aunt Crubb's beautiful, big 
house filled with my own kind of girls and men. 
Sometimes it's hard for me to be a steady, plod- 
ding example-for-good. But " 

Nancy smiled upon him the particular smile 
that meant that she was going to have her own 
way. She was the only person who ever dis- 



Nancy the Joyous 175 

obeyed him, which was one reason he liked her. 

" But I'm not going." 

To the Bishop she wrote, " Light a candle for 
me on Christmas Day and set it in your library. 
That will stand for Nancy." 

Then she went among the people, scattering 
suggestions, until she had all Swaggerty agog 
talking plans for the approaching holidays. 




T is not often that dreams 
come true more wonder- 
fully even than one 
visioned them; but this 
was so of Nancy's Christ- 
mas in Swaggerty. 

As holiday time drew 
near she thought more 
and more wistfully of the 
swell of Christmas feeling that was rising like 
a glad tide over the world outside. A week 
before Christmas she wanted to ride over into 
the next valley; but they were already drinking 
and shooting on Possum Creek and Uncle Lem- 
mie did not think it safe to let her go. The fol- 
lowing day there came down from the settlement 
in the gap above them the sounds of shouting 
and shooting, proving that the holiday " Old 
Corn " had arrived there and the pranking 
begun. What could one girl do at the center of 
such a maelstrom! 

If only we trust it, life always sends us what 

176 



Nancy the Joyous 177 

we need. This is a truth to hold to. In her mail 
there chanced to be a magazine article describing 
how a New England town hung its Christmas 
greens on the outside instead of the inside of its 
dwellings as a means of radiating Christmas 
cheer. Something in the idea quickened Nancy's 
courage. Swaggerty, she determined, should be 
a radiating center, a luminous spot, which would 
show this drunken, roistering mountain country 
the true way to keep the festival of the Christ- 
child. 

First she offered three prizes fifty, forty 
and thirty cents ! for the houses within a five- 
mile limit whose exteriors were most attractively 
trimmed. Not only choice but necessity de- 
manded that the decorations should be hung on 
the outside, for where a family of from six to 
twelve live in a one-room cabin, the Christmas 
" bush " must stand in the dooryard and the 
decorations be hung on the outer walls. Her 
plans grew. The meetinghouse was to be opened 
and warmed as a kind of clubhouse for the 
younger men with adventuring blood who were 
to take charge of mounting a Christmas tree. 

With the abrupt, whole-hearted enthusiasm of 



178 Nancy the Joyous 

children Swaggerty started out to set the county 
an example in Christmas keeping. They had 
never before heard of such a thing as decorating 
their houses, but they went at it with the will to 
do. Each house was first flanked on the outside 
with green boughs and these hung with scraps of 
paper, bits of cloth, dead rabbits, tobacco signs, 
anything that came to hand, provided only it had 
color. Each house had its Christmas bush 
standing in the yard. This did not hold the 
family gifts there were none but just 
formed a kind of storm center in the whirlwind 
of decorations. 

Betsy Jane Skidmore worked two days and 
two nights without taking off her clothes, to 
make up old newspapers into trimming for her 
house, snipping the whole night through by the 
light from her hearth. The art-child of her brain 
was a newspaper rose formed of three paper 
disks of decreasing size, notched around the edge 
and fastened flat one upon the other. These in- 
spired such enthusiasm that they spread like a 
contagion. 

She said, " While I set there working, I'd get 
so happy that I'd find myself a-mumblin' and 



Nancy the Joyous 179 

a-singin' and a-laughin' and a-shoutin' to myself." 

An old woman came walking down the valley 
to " take Christmas " with her folks. 

"Sakes!" she cried, "what's took Swag- 
gerty? " 

Aunt Hiley Ann replied with lofty unconcern, 
" Oh, we're just prettyin' up for Christmas." 

The rumor of what they were doing spread 
through the county. A man riding through by 
the way of their road carried the news that all 
Swaggerty was trimmed up, adding with rustic 
humor that he " even met an old hog running 
down the road with a twig sticking out of each 
ear." 

By this time not a soul in the settlement would 
have got drunk. They felt that they were set- 
ting the county an example. 

So Christmas morning came and the sun looked 
down upon them out of a clear, crisp sky. None 
but a mountaineer mind could set a relative value 
on the decorations, so Nancy chose three old men 
to act as judges. By nine o'clock they started 
out on muleback for their round of inspection, 
wearing a pleasant touch of self-consciousness. 
In the meantime the younger men had gathered 



180 Nancy the Joyous 

at the " church-house " to hang the gifts. They 
had the walls wreathed and festooned with holly 
and a whole gleaming holly tree standing ready 
for its load of presents. 

At noon Nancy selected two of the girls and 
three young fellows who might prove dangerous 
ringleaders and swept them in to Christmas din- 
ner with her. It was canned corn beef; but never 
mind that. She did not dare let them go to 
their homes. She had to keep her hands on them 
all day. When the plum pudding Aunt Crubb 
sent was brought on, wreathed in holly, she sup- 
plied some of her guests with horns and the oth- 
ers, at her request, whistled lustily while it was 
cut. This shed a fascination over what they 
knew only as the commonplace business of eat- 
ing. A stimulating sense of danger ran through- 
out the day. Would it be possible, Nancy won- 
dered, to hold Swaggerty to its high standard 
through those empty, unsatisfying hours of early 
afternoon? 

Just as her guests were scraping their saucers 
for the last drop of pudding sauce, outside rose 
suddenly a din and clamor. Apprehension 
gripped at her heart. They all rushed for the 



Nancy the Joyous 181 

door. Without adieus the three men guests broke 
past her for the road, for there before the house 
trooped a loose procession, shouting and chatter- 
ing. It was Swaggerty marching down to meet 
the judges. Such a democratic throng it was; 
some afoot, some muleback; men, women, chil- 
dren ; hunting dogs flanking the march with quick 
yaps of excitement ; a cow that had got herded in, 
and a nervous, excited hen or two that had 
dodged in and was squawking forward in terror 
of being trodden underfoot. They passed on, 
leaving Nancy weak from the stress of fear 
turned suddenly to joy. 

Three quarters of an hour passed before she 
heard the sound of their returning; shouts of 
triumph, the shrill notes of a mountain song; the 
punctuating blare of a tin horn. Then some- 
where down the road broke in the ringing of a 
dinner bell. This caught from cabin to cabin for 
five miles up and down the valley. 

Betsy Jane Skidmore said, " I was never so 
happy in all my life. I jes' wanted to yell but I 
thought every body 'd think I'd gone plumb crazy, 
so I choked and swallowed it down till I thought 
I'd bust my bosom. Then I heard the bells a- 



182 Nancy the Joyous 

ringin' and the Lord put it into my head to sing 
an old song my pap used to sing, ' The Heaven 
Bells is Ringin'.' And I said, ' Children, we ain't 
got no bell to ring but let's sing her.' So we sang 
her: ' Oh, the heaven bells is ringin'.' It just 
fitted the 'casion and before I knew it, I was 
flappin' my arms and shoutin'. 

' When Uncle Lemmie come ridin' along with 
the flag, his face just shone as he will never 
face it to the world again. ' Children,' I said, 
' just look at Uncle Lemmie's face.' 

" ' Oh, the heaven bells is ringin' ! ' When I 
heard that thar horn I said, ' That's Gabriel 
blarin' his trumpet. Seems like Swaggerty is 
just Heaven and he's blowin' his horn. Sure the 
Lord is in Swaggerty this day.' He was right 
here, walkin* up and down the road. I said, 
' Children, why shouldn't He be here as well as 
anywhere else? ' 

The procession came up a little knoll in the 
road to Nancy's house, the flag and the judges 
ahead, with the crowd following; men, women 
and children, dogs and chickens, with " Miss 
Lynn " that was a cow named after her in 
the center, joyously switching her tail. 



Nancy the Joyous 183 

The Christmas bush that night was a whole 
holly tree, the lighted candles glittering on its red 
berries and on the gifts sent in. Nancy could not 
reconcile herself to having it at any time but 
night; though Swaggerty warned her that with 
all the drinking and roistering going on in the 
mountains this would not be safe, because of the 
strangers who would ride into the settlement to 
view it. Her foolhardiness prevailed; though 
she did not realize how great a danger they 
accepted for her sake until she learned that every 
man in Swaggerty came to the Christmas bush 
with a loaded revolver. For miles and miles 
strangers came to keep Christmas night with 
them. Perhaps they guessed at those hidden 
revolvers; but she liked to believe that they, too, 
caught the clean joy. However that may be, 
from the entrance of the first visitor to the last 
sound of a departing hoof -beat, there was never 
a more orderly gathering than the one that 
crowded the festive little meetinghouse to its 
utmost. 

Santa Claus was there on his first visit, in all 
the friendly joviality of his red suit and white 
beard. It was a part the settlement wit had 



184 Nancy the Joyous 

never seen played, but his clumsy antics met with 
uproarious enthusiasm. He held complete sway 
and beamed on the little children. 

Santa Claus held sway until the time came to 
close with Christmas carols, the first carols that 
ever Swaggerty had sung upon a frosty Christ- 
mas night. The settlement had gathered at 
Nancy's cabin and practiced them for days back. 
They had been a strong bond to hold them to 
their standard. The strength of these venerable 
songs is in their objectiveness. Swaggerty Cove 
really saw the guiding star; it journeyed with the 
" three wise men from afar." If it was a trip 
by muleback over mountain roads, what matter 
so long as they brought the true gifts of the 
spirit to the new-born king. But the most deeply 
of all they loved : 

" Once in royal David's city 
Stood a lowly cattle shed, 
Where a mother laid her Baby 
In a manger for His bed." 

To them it was no tradition dulled by repeti- 
tion; it was fact. They knew out of their own 
experiences the insufficiency of such shelter. 



Nancy the Joyous 185 

They heard the rustle of the fodder and the slow 
munching of the cattle in the dark. They knew 
the pang and the joy of it. With tears rolling 
down their faces they sang: 

"And His shelter was a stable, 
And His cradle was a stall." 

Betsy Jane Skidmore was right. The Lord 
that day did walk up and down the road in Swag- 
gerty; and life after was always different to 
those who heard the sound of His garments as 
He passed. 




Dear Bishop, 

I guess the whole armor was too heavy for me. 
My poor little body is like a horse fagged into 
balkiness. I can't make it get up and move. I 
lie all day on a cot in front of the fireplace but 
the flames that leap up the chimney do not bring 
me dreams. I can't seem to care about them. 
This is Sunday morning and my people are sing- 
ing in the " church-house " next door, Marget 
yelling her words chestily and Betsy Jane drawl- 
ing three notes behind the others in her fervor 
and croaking in her throat. But I can't even be 
amused. 

The Christmas gifts sent in to me still lie on 
my table in their tissue paper. I just have not 
got round to open them, because when I see them 
I shudder and turn away. All except the locket 

186 



Nancy the Joyous 187 

with your picture in it that I asked for. I hold 
that closed in my hand. It makes you seem 
nearer me. 

The doctor-man " stopped by " a week ago and 
found me sitting alone in my cabin hi all the 
glory, of my pink and violet gown, elbows on the 
table, chin in my palms, looking straight before 
me. But he wasn't amused at the incongruity of 
it as I had thought I should be when I dressed 
up. His eyes were stern from the first minute 
they rested on me. He asked me how long I had 
been sitting there and I said I didn't know. He 
declared this was no place for me ; that he would 
come himself in the morning to drive me out to 
the railroad and send me back to the life to which 
I belong. Then, suddenly, though really I was 
feeling hollow and absent from myself, I began 
to laugh and talk foolishness. I insisted that I 
wouldn't go; that I was getting full swing of a 
sanctified vocabulary and if I could only get in 
three minutes' conversation with Saint Peter at 
the gate he would let me in on my phrases alone. 
He looked so stern that I remember getting 
frightened and laughing and asking him if he 
supposed the gate was a turnstile, for then I 



188 Nancy the Joyous 

didn't stand a chance. But he just turned on his 
heel without a word and the next thing in came 
Marget with orders from him to put me right 
to bed. 

He has been very good ; he has been over every 
day and sometimes his rides are so he can stop 
twice during the day; so you must not worry; 
and, then, I am much better. You would be sur- 
prised, for instance, how much strength I have 
in my hands. I can keep my fingers closed over 
your locket the whole day without once opening 
them. 

My doctor is a great man, friend o' mine, and 
nobody knows about him. The love of a girl 
doesn't hinder his kind from being great. There 
are different kinds, I find. I have another friend 
who is going to be famous some day. I know 
he is a busy man but yet I couldn't help believ- 
ing that at Christinas time he would 

I'm too tired to write any more; only, please, 
Bishop, ask Aunt Crubb if she will look over her 
Christmas mail again and see if she has not over- 
looked something for me ; just a note or a card or 
even a newspaper. I asked her once and you 
please ask her to do it again. 



Nancy the Joyous 189 

I'm in good hands, don't worry; and when I 
get strong again I shall have nothing in my 
heart but my work. 

Annie. 
Jan. 2. 




Dear Friend o' Mine, 

Would you really have cared so much? Think 
of your not going into your library for three days 
because of the sight of a half -burned candle 
standing there. I am nearly myself again and 
am looking at the moon over my right shoulder. 

Please tell Aunt Crubb I have that piece of 
mail. It is just a little parchment volume, hand- 
tooled, of glad, brave poems. I must not 
acknowledge it; but I put it among my Christ- 
mas gifts and they all looked so beautiful. 

I have smiled over the consternation the book 
has caused in the settlement. Marget was here 
when I opened the package. " From the Heart " 
is the name of the book. That does not signify 
that they are love poems. It means only that 
each comes as a direct, glad impulse from some 

190 



Nancy the Joyous 191 

brave heart. These are the ones he knew I would 
enjoy: I understand. But Marget is one of the 
few in Swaggerty who can read, and when she 
saw the title, her jaw fell under the weight of 
sundry conclusions which I have been unable to 
dispel. Later in the day when I crept down to 
Aunt Hiley Ann's cabin, I found the whole set- 
tlement there singing, as it were, a dirge with the 
refrain that I was going away to be married. I 
find myself the victim of what might be termed 
funeral obsequies. Saturday Aunt Hiley Ann 
kills six chickens and invites everybody in. 

" I love the very ground you walk on," sniffles 
Uncle Lemmie, " and if we've got to lose you, we 
must cook for you." 

Doctor looks perplexed and says I do not 
recuperate the way other people do but am just 
smiling myself back into health. I wrap up in a 
long coat and sit out in the sun looking about 
me on the singing land. When the afternoon 
turns to purple the valley fills up with shadows. 
Then I have a feeling that the smile sinks quietly 
down into the depths of me and that it will lie 
there and grow old-fashioned, the way Miss 
Schuyler's did. For there is style in the way 



192 Nancy the Joyous 

of smiling. Mine won't be chic when I come 
back. 

Since I have been sick the people have treated 
me like a pampered child. Only a few minutes 
ago Marget came in with a bit of hard pink 
candy. She is the grand lady of the section 
and had bartered a half dozen eggs for some 
sweets for herself and her brood of seven. 

" But I couldn't enjoy it without I saved you 
a piece," she said, thrusting her head in the door. 
" I counted seven of 'em but it seemed like I 
had eight." 

So don't again dread the sight of the half- 
burned candle, but light it and say, " That's 
Nancy ; a f oolish little taper moulded for worldly 
uses but trying to shine in a dark corner." 

From the Heart, 

Nancy. 
January 25. 




SUNDAY morning came, 
when the doctor gave his 
permission for Nancy to 
go back to the little 
" church-house." It was 
good to stand again 
between the rude walls, 
the mountain folk sitting 
before her, their faces 
lifted in rows, each lighted from within by a smile. 
She was a girl who talked little about herself; 
but she pictured for them something of her lonely, 
shifted childhood; how she had grown to love 
them in here; how this was the first place that 
had ever held for her a feeling of home. Her 
three months were over; Miss Schuyler was not 
to come back and the Board had said that Nancy 
Lynn might contract for the coming year. She 
told them honestly how some woman fitted to 
help them might be sent in, while now it was they 
who were teaching her. 

Betsy Jane Skidmore leaped to her feet, ten- 

193 



194 Nancy the Joyous 

derly defiant, crying, " I nigger dare 'em to take 
you away." 

They all huddled about in a close cirele, their 
eyes caressing her and their lips trembling with 
feeling. Aunt Hiley Ann held both her hands 
in a hard grip. 

" We'd rather go on taking care of you." 

So Nancy Lynn stayed. 

After the year makes the turn at Christmas, 
the suffering in the mountains is from the cold. 
It is not the snow that harasses, but the frosts 
and the biting winds. They keep the flames roar- 
ing in the fireplaces but these warm only a small 
circle of the dead cold that lies in the houses. 
Most of the cabins have no windows, so it is nec- 
essary to leave the door open all winter to let in 
the light. It was bleak and cold in the mornings 
when at five o'clock Nancy crept out of bed. She 
did her morning housework, tiptilting on her toes 
to keep the blood in them, constantly blowing on 
her fingers to keep them warm. But her dis- 
comfiture was nothing compared with that of the 
women and children who went up before the 
break of dawn to pull fodder or break new 
ground in the steep-sloping fields. Many of 



Nancy the Joyous 195 

them walked barefooted through the frost. 
When Nancy looked out of her windows in the 
morning dark, high up in the clearings the bon- 
fires at which they warmed themselves gleamed 
like low-hung stars. 

So the winter wore on. 

One afternoon in the early dusk the doctor, 
who had stopped in passing, had risen to take 
leave. 

" You never told me whether or not you like 
my book," he suggested, pausing by the table. 

"What book?" 

He lifted a volume just high enough to slant 
its title towards her. 

She read, " ' From the Heart.' 

" Did you send me that book? " 

" Yes. I expected you to go for the holidays, 
you remember, and I planned it so you would get 
it at Christmas-time." 

Nancy stood silent, looking down at the vol- 
ume, which had come to her readdressed in Mrs. 
Crubb's handwriting. 

" Didn't you like it? " begged the doctor. " I 
thought it would appeal to you." 

"Yes; I did. It cured me. That was what 



196 Nancy the Joyous 

I was thinking about the days I sat out in the 
sun getting well." 

" I felt sure it would please you dear," he 
added tentatively. 

But Nancy Lynn did not hear him. 

She threw a long coat around her and walked 
down the path with him to where his horse was 
tied. Here she delayed his leave-taking. She 
felt a sudden dread of being left alone. When 
finally he had mounted, she laid her fingers 
lightly over his bridle-hand. Her face looked 
up at him through the dusk like a flower. 

" If a girl told a man, straight-out, that she 
jilted him because someone else could give her 
silk stockings to wear, she needn't expect to hear 
from him, need she? " 

" Hardly." 

"Of course not; she just mustn't expect it." 

The doctor from Salt Lick smiled down at 
Nancy's little feet clad against the cold in home- 
knit woolen stockings and heavy shoes. 

" Would you like silk stockings? " 

" No, I loathe them ! I loathe silk stockings ! " 

There was nothing melodramatic about Nancy 
Lynn. Her strain of Puritan blood, which was 



Nancy the Joyous 197 

beginning to assert itself, would not have per- 
mitted her to indulge in heroics. After he had 
gone, she fastened the long coat about her and 
went on down the trail in the dusk, seeking 
human companionship. The child she found 
strayed and crying in the dusk, she gathered up 
and quieted in her arms. 

" No, I can't come in," she called, setting the 
little one on its own threshold. 

She untangled a hunting dog that had got 
knotted up in its leash. So she worked her way 
a mile down the valley road. 

Here she came on a group of folks at the 
mouth of a gully, burning out some limestone 
for the lime. But their axes lay idle, and no one 
was minding the pile rearing its brilliant crest 
of flames in the dark. A common curiosity hud- 
dled them all into a close knot which was sil- 
houetted against the orange flare. 

Nancy pushed her way in among them, 

' What is the matter? " she asked as one with 
authority. 

"It's a letter " 

" to all us folks." 

" about you." 



198 Nancy the Joyous 

" from somebody who calls hisse'f David." 
Nancy snatched the white sheet from the man 
who was laboriously trying to read it aloud. She 
did not even turn to the beginning but com- 
menced to read where her eyes first fell. 

" When her father and mother died they gave 
her to me. She is the most precious thing I have. 
It is because she loves you that I am letting her 
stay there; but I charge you to watch over and 
keep her for me ; and God will bless you in doing 
it, even as He has richly blessed me in her. 

" Hubert Davidson." 



/3/<: /^- 




Right Reverend Hubert Davidson. Dear 

I don't know what to call you. I am a little 
afraid of you to-night, with the joyful fear of a 
beautiful vision. So you are David! 

Are you really David? Then as a lonely child 
I have kicked my cousins in the shins in your 
name and cried myself to sleep with your name 
between the sobs. And now a grown girl I hold 
out both my hands to you. 

I shall try harder for your sake to grow such 
a woman as mother was. 

Annie Laird Lynn. 
February 12. 



199 




Dear Doc, 

You remember the silver-mounted medicine 
case you sent me just before I came out. You 
will be interested to know its fate. But first 
I'll have to explain a bit. 

The situation here is grave, with an inevitable 
crisis not so many years ahead. It is a big coun- 
try with undeveloped mines and a considerable 
market for trade. England and Russia are each 
trying to reach in and get a hand clutched before 
the rest of the world wakes up to what they have 
been doing. On account of the suzerainty of 
China over Tibet, our staff superintends its mili- 
tary and foreign affairs, while its civil and 
religious departments are in the hands of a 
cabinet of priests. These priests distrust the 

Chinese, so between the two departments there 

200 



Nancy the Joyous 201 

is little cooperation; in fact, smothered hostility. 
From the first I have maintained that this is 
the gravest peril; that it is necessary at all costs 
to establish internal peace founded on confidence 
and fair play. 

To accomplish this our department needs to 
win over the backing of the priesthood. There 
are two Holy Men; though, as a matter of fact, 
since his flight before the English, the Dalai 
Lama does not count with the people. That 
leaves only the Tashi Lama. He is what the 
Pope is to the Romanists, only he controls a 
greater number of people and controls them more 
entirely because they are so blackly ignorant. 
He resides here at Shigatse. I chose this town 
instead of Lhassa, where the other Chinese gov- 
ernor is stationed, in hopes of opening a way 
towards effecting a union. 

On our arrival both the Governor and I sent 
messengers of state asking for audiences but 
received no recognition. I came near to accept- 
ing this move as blocked, but yesterday, to 
my great satisfaction, the Tashi Lama's chief 
munshi came with the announcement that he 
would give me an audience to-day. The escort 



202 Nancy the Joyous 

arrived for me about mid-morning. We rode up 
the mountain for a quarter of an hour, came to 
the main entrance in the wall surrounding the 
lamasery, dismounted and proceeded on foot 
through a village of monastery buildings to the 
Tashi Lama's dwelling. His chief secretary re- 
ceived me in a room full of idols in cases of solid 
gold. He is a man with a manner of solemn 
dignity and conviction, helped out by his gor- 
geous robes. 

From there we went into a dim main hall where 
we waited the summons. Through a central 
opening in the high ceiling the daylight crept in. 
In the shadows along the walls stood cases of 
gold. At the far end of the hall were idols before 
which stood a long table with sacrificial offerings, 
lamps and burning incense. Now and then bare- 
headed, barefooted lamas in red togas crept 
around to snuff the lamps and set the incense 
sticks straight. I tell you, Doc, the overpower- 
ing mystery of such a place in time could drug a 
man. 

Finally we were summoned and made our way 
along stone corridors to the anteroom where the 
secretary whispered in my ear to prepare myself; 



Nancy the Joyous 203 

then he left. The door ahead swung open. For a 
minute I couldn't see a thing. 

In there I found a man. 

In contrast to the magnificence we had been 
through, here was a great, bare room, half roofed 
over and half open to the sky like a yard. There 
were no idols, no furniture; just the stone floor. 
In one of the window recesses was fixed a bench 
and on this sat a figure in the coarse red gar- 
ments of his humblest monks. 

I bowed in the doorway and advanced until I 
stood before the bench where sat the most vener- 
ated person in the whole world. Imagine my sur- 
prise to find him a young man of my own age. 
It took me some time to grasp this because of his 
smile the most penetrating, the gentlest smile I 
have ever seen on a man's face. 

He held out both hands and motioned me to 
be seated on a bench near. Then he began to 
talk through the interpreter. He inquired about 
our journey in from China, about America and 
about the countries of Europe, especially about 
their kings and emperors. He was so simple, sit- 
ting there in his window recess and looking out 
over the valley of Shigatse, that it was hard to 



204 Nancy the Joyous 

keep in mind that he has more power than any 
king on earth. He governs the thoughts of all 
the Buddhists. 

We had the Tibetan ceremony of tea drinking 
and exchanged gifts. He is believed by the 
people to be the reincarnation of the great doctor, 
Tsong Kapas, so I had brought your medicine 
case as the most appropriate article in my pos- 
session to offer. While I held it in my hands 
explaining its parts, he held both of his under- 
neath them. As we bent over it together, such is 
his gentleness and simplicity, it seemed merely 
that we were two young men of an age interested 
for the time in the same thing. 

I repeatedly rose to leave but each time he 
motioned me to be seated, until I had been there 
three hours. He has ordered another audience 
for next week. 

Of course it stands for a good deal politically 
but I don't seem to focus on that phase of it 
yet. That extraordinary quiet man up there lays 
hold upon one personally. He braces one to go 
ahead and do things. And primarily he gives 
one poise ; a determination to slough off whatever 
engenders bitterness. " If thy right hand 



Nancy the Joyous 205 

offend thee, cut it off," is the thought his pres- 
ence seems to breathe. 

I wish you could have been there. 
Here's to the success of the thing you want 
most. 

Very truly yours, 

John Carter. 




HE year wore on towards 
spring. It was different 
now that Nancy was 
really the " worker " in 
Swaggerty. As Mrs. 
Crubb had said, for three 
months she had merely 
played a game, just as 
she had played games all 
her life. But now when she tried to pray she 
was not very good at it she put her face into 
her hands and then found herself repeating 
that she had Swaggerty to lead for a year. It 
quieted her. The doctor understood the differ- 
ence. Instead of setting her tasks among his 
sick, he kept begging her not to work so hard. 
But the people did not realize that she had 
changed, for her feet still danced in the sunshine 
and her quick, glad young laughter sounded up 
and down the mountain road. That was, per- 
haps, most of all the miracle that she worked, 
for Swaggerty became a center of happiness, of 

206 



Nancy the Joyous 207 

good will. This was the rumor of it that spread 
abroad throughout the county. The little moun- 
tain children, who had never known what or how 
to play, had singsong games to weave and chant 
in the sunshine. Their elders caught the habit 
of joviality over their work. The mail carrier 
began to smile expectantly when he turned into 
the long road down Swaggerty Valley. Even 
the doctor no longer hurried through but would 
sit sideways in his saddle and laugh until the set- 
tlement rang. 

Marget was one of Nancy's especial friends, a 
big woman with the complexion and eyes of a 
girl. She was twenty-eight and had seven chil- 
dren whom she managed without any particular 
sense of responsibility. You could hear her a 
quarter of a mile down the road, laughing care- 
freely or singing out of tune at the top of her 
voice. For one whole day she and Nancy 
amused themselves in off moments by stealing 
Aunt Hiley Ann's preserves. Besides Marget, 
Aunt Hiley Ann had another daughter with 
whose help they so arranged it that each time 
they would be caught just as they were depart- 
ing with the jars. 



208 Nancy the Joyous 

" They're such foolish little jokes," said Nancy 
to the doctor almost beseechingly. " But these 
are my children and it's just a little woman- 
knack of making them happy. I do it just as a 
mother puts her hands up before her face and 
plays ' Boo.' " 

Swaggerty took the Bishop's charge to care 
for her literally. One day a man who came 
down from off the ridge was ordered out of the 
settlement for " profane cussin' and swearin'." 

" It's not for the like of Miss Nancy's ears 
and we won't have it in Swaggerty," they said. 

" Sometimes I feel sorry for the Crusty Old 
Person," thought Nancy. " I wish I could take 
him among the cabins and show him that after all, 
life with all its efforts and ambitions is just our 
chance of winning love." 

About a mile down the road a steep gully cuts 
down the side of the ridge, meeting the highway 
at right angles. It is a barren, worthless tract, 
with scrub trees growing among its profitless 
ledges and a tiny thread of water trickling down 
in the steep, sharp bed of it. Here in a kind of 
sub-settlement by themselves lived Betsy Jane 
Skidmore and three other families of her kind. 



Nancy the Joyous 209 

Aunt Hiley Ann and M^rget represented social 
position but Nancy Lynn clung equally to the 
gully folk. They were crop-sharers; that is, 
they owned no land but squatted in the hollow 
and worked on shares anywhere up and down the 
mountains. 

The imaginations of the gully folk took for 
their special possession Nancy's aunt, Mrs. 
Amelia Crubb, raising her to dizzy heights of 
elegance. It came through Nancy's giving one 
of their children a red-globed lantern such as 
Mrs. Crubb used to decorate the verandas of her 
summer home. He was a sorry little chap with a 
hip disease. When all the other children trooped 
off with their elders into the fields to crop it or 
up into the mountain to break ground, he stayed 
alone in the gully crippling over the rocks. It 
kept Nancy anxious for fear he might stumble 
on the ledges when he was alone in the early 
morning dark. This lantern was so light that 
he could carry it in his hand against the stick of 
his crutches. It wrung her heart to see him, with 
his new feeling of possession and expansion, lord- 
ing it over the gully. 

The morning she carried it up to him they 



210 Nancy the Joyous 

sat side by side on the doorstep of his home, for 
all the world like two rock birds on the edge of 
a high-perched nest. The land fairly slid away 
from under their feet in the dizzy slope it made 
to the valley. When they raised their eyes and 
set them to level gazing, it was like taking flight 
into a sky filled with purple mountain-heads. 

As they sat thus, warming themselves in the 
noon sunshine, she told him the story of how her 
Aunt Crubb had many such lights as the one he 
held swung down in between his knees, and how 
on summer evenings she hung them up in rows 
around her house. 

A couple of days later when Betsy Jane Skid- 
more dropped in to pay Nancy a visit, this story 
returned to her, like bread cast on the waters; 
but so thoroughly had it been adapted to the con- 
ditions of gully life, so clipt of wing, that Nancy 
scarcely recognized it. In the center of an extra 
large log house sat Mrs. Amelia Crubb in a 
straight- backed, splint-bottomed chair in a state 
of extreme elegance, too haughty even to cross 
the floor and poke her own back-log. Betsy 
Jane went so far as to put it, " or knock the 
ashes out'n of her own pipe." The four walls 



Nancy the Joyous 211 

about her were starred with colored lanterns. 
They could not conceive of anyone's hanging 
them on the outside of a house. 

Every evening for many nights this one little 
red-globed light was hung on a peg and as many 
of the gully folks as could crowd into the cabin, 
sat down to look at it in imitation of Mrs. Crubb. 

"Just listen," commanded Mrs. Crubb; and 
read the Bishop an account of it. This picture 
of herself amused Mrs. Crubb. 

" c Too proud to knock the ashes out'n her own 
pipe,' " she chuckled with appreciation. Yet 
somehow she was flattered. 

' You might call me the cherubim of the gully. 
Their idea of me is just about as close as the cher- 
ubim come to reality. But think of that child 
telling them about me! " she added wistfully. 

" Let me tell you what I have been thinking 
over lately, Bishop. To build " here Mrs. 
Crubb went off into a rehearsal of plans. " It 
would cost about " and she gave a schedule of 
sums which showed that she had already been 
consulting some professional. "I'm going to 
make Mr. Williams help me. We two could do 
it and never miss the money. The next time 



212 Nancy the Joyous 

your Miss Schuyler comes to the city, bring her 
over and I'll call Mr. Williams and we'll talk 
the matter over with her." 




T WAS a wild Wack night 
with a hurricane of wind 
blowing down the valley. 
Nancy drew the curtain 
aside and peered out, but 
not a single light gleamed 
back at her from the 
blackness. 

" I must be the only 
one astir in the settlement," she thought. 

She drew her table out into the center of the 
room and set herself to cutting out some sewing. 
She was not often nervous but that night 
possibly because of the all-predominating rush 
of the wind down Swaggerty Valley a sense 
of apprehension and a womanish craving for 
strong arms of protection dried her eyeballs and 
tightened at the muscles of her throat. 

She was working with her face towards the 
firelight and her back to the storm. With a sud- 
den flap the door behind her swung open and a 
draft of wind rushed past her up the chimney 

213 



214 Nancy the Joyous 

flue. She turned quickly to close it so that the 
smoke would not be sucked back into the room, 
and found herself confronting two strange men. 
Back in there, folks enter a house without 
knocking. 

' What do you want? " she demanded appre- 
hensively. 

" Old Pete Crodell is sick. He wants you 
to come pray over him." 

Pete Crodell was a mountain roustabout, one 
of those insidious middle-aged characters who 
cling on to the spirit of youth and by some per- 
sonal charm make themselves the moving spirit 
in the carousals of their juniors. The doings 
and the misdoings of him and his followers were 
known to Nancy by report. But the mountain 
mind is a breeding place for sudden religious 
spasms ; so she felt no further mistrust. 

Slipping on a long coat to shield her from the 
storm, Nancy Lynn lighted her lantern and went 
with the two strangers down the big road. They 
kept it for two miles along the valley and then 
began to climb the ridge up the cleft of an old 
washout. The night was of the thick blackness 
into which one would put out the hand to feel 



Nancy the Joyous 215 

a way as along a blind wall. A sudden heighten- 
ing of the wind at times seemed to snatch the 
very breath out of the mouth and rush away 
with it. The trail up the old torrent bed was 
merely a succession of jagged, unexpected foot- 
holds. Here the lantern was an imperative ne- 
cessity. Because she needed both hands for climb- 
ing, one of the men carried it for her, holding 
it low so as to show her places to set her feet. 
Sometimes when they came to the flat face of a 
precipice, she gave him both her hands to help 
her up. So at last they topped the ridge and set 
their feet into an easy winding path. Then 
she saw she was being led to " the pond." 

Up where the mountain-tops cluster together 
like low, rounded hills lies a shallow pond of 
water and about it, in the pockets of the hills, 
are three or four cabins. The last moonshining 
and consequently the high carousing of the 
immediate section was carried on here. The 
Swaggerty folk knew all about it and sometimes 
late in the night they heard young fellows 
screaming and shooting down their valley from 
the pond. But the mountain folk never inter- 
fere with one another's affairs. 



216 Nancy the Joyous 

In the wild blackness before them, Nancy saw 
a red square of firelight that designated the open 
door of a house. As they neared it, she could 
even see the play of the firelight on the walls and 
catch the urge of voices. This picture ahead of 
them, like something anticipated, filled one of 
her two guides with haste and elation. The other 
the one that had carried her lantern and helped 
her climb the gully stopped, foot-still, in the 
path. 

" I say, Miss "he began penitently. 

The silhouette of a man came anticipatingly 
into the glare of the door and the volume of 
voices increased. Nancy was swept along into 
the house as though a demon of the wild night 
had laid hands on her and pushed her in. 

The hearth was piled dangerously high with 
firewood and Nancy Lynn stood blinking in 
the middle of the room until the sudden hurt of 
the light in her eyes eased down. Then, backed 
around the walls of the room, she discovered a 
solid phalanx of strange men, grinning at her, 
and she knew that she was caught in the trap of 
some horrible mountain joke. 

" Here's the man what wants you to pray over 



Nancy the Joyous 217 

him," said one from along the wall, impatient 
for the fun to begin. 

A loud guffaw followed his remark. 

He kicked forward. Nancy followed the 
direction indicated by his boot and looked down. 
Against her very feet lay old Pete Crodell, dead 
drunk. His coat had been put on him wrong 
side out; chicken feathers had been twisted into 
his hair; one half of his face had been blackened 
with charred wood and the other half painted 
red with mountain clay. 

" He's the man who wants you to pray over 
him," repeated a voice at her back. They seemed 
obsessed with this one sentence. 

Nancy turned her head in the direction of the 
last speaker and in so doing, swept with a glance 
a whole half circle of them, their eyes focused on 
her, their faces leering. 

The line of men had now shifted across the 
doorway. The only spot of refuge free from 
them was the hearth, blazing high with flames. 
Nancy shrank towards this, cowering before the 
sudden revelation flung up into her very face of 
the polluting depths of hellishness that exist in 
human nature. 



218 Nancy the Joyous 

A low laugh ran round the circle. 

At the sound something whether anger or 
fear or courage rose within her. She slipped 
off the long coat she wore and threw it over Pete 
Crodell, covering him from head to feet and blot- 
ting out from sight one object of their wild, cruel 
humor. Thus she stood, its sole victim. Then she 
stretched out her trembling hands above him and 
prayed. 

Nancy Lynn did not know what words she 
used any more than she knew what was the next 
step they had planned for their terrible comedy. 
Even while she spoke, horrible black rumors of 
things done in the drunken mountain frolics 
filled her mind. She caught the play of the fire- 
light on the white dress she wore and remembered 
with a pang the half-burnt taper in the Bishop's 
library. 

In their midst, with hands outstretched, Nancy 
Lynn pleaded the cause of them that mocked. 

The grimaces died on their faces, like lights 
blown out. She heard a half-drunken sob beside 
her. 

" And me oh, save me, too! " she cried sud- 
denly, closing her fingers over her palms con- 



Nancy the Joyous 219 

vulsively; and darted between them out into the 
night. 

Flying down the footpath, she brushed against 
the man with the lantern. His stomach had sick- 
ened of the joke and he had not gone inside. 

" Wait, wait, miss. I'll see you get back safe." 

She ran only the faster from the sound of his 
voice, her feet catching and stumbling. Her one 
blind desire was for home. He strode along, 
keeping pace with her and swinging the light so 
that the rays fell before her feet. When they 
came to the gorge, he held out his hand and she 
put hers into it, though she could not have 
spoken to him. She half ran, half slipped down 
the old torrent bed, so that she was bruised and 
torn before she reached its foot. As soon as she 
dropped down into the big road with Swaggerty 
ahead, she began to run again as though she were 
alone. 

When he handed the lantern back to her at 
her door, he said repentantly, 

" Us fellows hate it that we plagued you. 
You needn't be feered of us nary again." 

But it was all too fresh for assurances to salve. 
She threw herself face down on her bed, her eyes 



220 Nancy the Joyous 

hidden in her arms, and lay there till daybreak. 

By that time Swaggerty had heard the news 
and gathered at her door in a wrathful group. 

" And us promised him we'd take care of her," 
sobbed Aunt Hiley Ann. 

The men wanted to ride at once up the ridge 
and do some shooting; but standing pale in the 
doorway before them, Nancy insisted on their 
civic responsibility; that they should forget her 
and think only of the welfare of the section. 
Swaggerty was bent on having the moonshining 
center raided, but agreed to leave it to the courts. 
It was a new state of mind for Swaggerty, but 
she held them to it. 

" Perhaps I have given them a bad case of self- 
righteousness," she thought. " They are step- 
ping high and looking down on less law-abiding 
settlements." 




OR a week Aunt Hiley 
Ann had been ailing. 
The doctor from Salt 
Lick and Nancy fought 
shoulder to shoulder but 
this time without avail. 
One morning she died 
and that afternoon they 
buried her. 

By one o'clock the fence across the road held 
a row of grizzled men, whittling solemnly and 
gazing unswervingly in through the open door 
at the preparation. Nancy's place was over by 
the doorstep with the women and children. At 
last Betsy Jane Skidmore thrust her head out 
and beckoned. The men slid down off the fence, 
closing their jackknives with a snap. The women 
hushed the little children against their breasts. A 
solemn hush fell over all. 

The coffin, nailed over with an old black dress 
skirt, passed out the door through an aisle of 
waiting folk, and turned up the road, borne on 

221 



222 Nancy the Joyous 

the shoulders of four men. The rest dropped 
into an irregular line behind it, swaying from 
foot to foot because of the slow pace it set them. 
They were awe-struck, all of them, by the mys- 
tery of the thing that moved ahead. 

Suddenly, like the snap of a pistol, a shriek 
arose, then another and another. The swayings 
of the marching people grew wilder. A low 
moan rumbled in their throats, gathering volume 
and rhythm. A voice in high falsetto broke 
out into a fierce dirge and others followed. It 
was a frantic, primitive lament rising naked to 
Heaven in jagged, precipitous notes, with omi- 
nous pauses, tightening the throat. 

' We are traveling to the grave 
For to lay this body down. 
Our fathers say they're happy, 
Oh, they're happy in the Lord ! 
For the last time that we heard them speak 
'Twas about their Heavenly home, 
'Twas about their Heavenly home. 
Oh, the new Jerusalem." 

The coffin was brought to a halt along the 
road ; someone let down the bars and they began 



Nancy the Joyous 223 

climbing a steep mountain slope where one must 
husband the breath. The singing stopped. They 
climbed up the slippery, sunburnt grass and over 
the ledges, minding their steps until in the corner 
of an airy clearing they came upon a burying- 
place. 

There they found a man standing up to his 
shoulders in an open grave. He had thrown his 
mattock out on the mound of new earth and was 
eating an early apple from the tree above him. 
The people set down the coffin and seated them- 
selves around on the rocks, waiting while he 
nipped the last bite off the core and tossed it 
backward over his shoulder. A branch broken 
from the apple tree measured the coffin and the 
grave, which was found short. Swaggerty 
focused its interest on the practical and watched 
while all was made fit. 

Then once again they turned from the com- 
monplace and faced death. The coffin lay open 
on the ground, the kinfolk kneeling about it. A 
mountain exhorter stood over them and preached. 
It was unguided ignorance looking up into the 
face of God leaning close down above them. 

Gray rainclouds, gathering, festooned them- 



224 Nancy the Joyous 

selves from mountain-top to mountain-top. 
Lifting his perspiring face, the mountain ex- 
horter discovered these. 

" Folkses, it's going to rain," he exclaimed. 
' We must hurry about this. If any of you want 
to look your last at her, come on." 

With the contracting circle Nancy Lynn drew 
near. There on a patched bedquilt, her sunbon- 
net on her head, lay Aunt Hiley Ann. Along 
beside her lay her knife, her pipe and some bits 
of candy. Nancy turned away with a tightening 
at her heart. There lay one who had been her 
friend. 

Through the long, slant rain they groped 
their way back down the mountain-side, leaving 
Aunt Hiley Ann swung into her grave on run- 
ners of wild grapevine. The rush of the storm 
was still beating down upon it when N ancy Lynn 
reached her own lonely cabin. She found the 
fire out on the hearth and the room cold and 
smelling of ashes. Not even a letter from David, 
as she now called the Bishop, could make the 
place cheerful. She stirred the embers until 
a few blue tongues of flame shot up. Then she 
rose and looked quickly about her as though 



Nancy the Joyous 225 

somewhere present in the chill damp of the place 
stood a Crusty Old Person. 

" Our chance to live before we go down to the 
grave, that is what we all ask," she cried rebel- 
liously. " No one has the right to take that away 
from us humans. It is what we are here for. 
There is nothing in all eternity that can make 
up for the loss of loving down here on the green 
fields of earth." 

She threw out both her hands appealingly. 

' Why mayn't I climb the heights to my great 
man and build a little fire at his feet so when 
he is tired he can bend and warm his hands beside 
mine ! How has anyone the right to tell me that 
I must not! " 




HE months rolled by and 
brought again the season 
of tawny, sunburnt grass 
and low-hanging hazes. 

One morning Nancy 
opened her eyes while 
day was still purple. She 
stretched up her arms, 
rejoicing in a little 
wakening strain that ran along them. 
" It's Thanksgiving Day," she cried. 
When she had done combing her hair, she 
leaned towards the glass, giving the braids a few 
last pats into shape. 

" And my David will slip his sanctified feet 
under somebody's dinner table and eat some- 
body's turkey. Being a bishop, he'll probably 
have the white meat." 

She drew a quick, anticipative breath and 
resolved to keep the whole day for herself. To 
Nancy Lynn, even being selfish carried with it 
a sense of adventure. 

226 



Nancy the Joyous 227 

In the early morning she closed her door 
behind her with a pleasant, running-away-from- 
school excitement and leaving Swaggerty behind 
climbed up across an open field of broom sedge. 
At a cabin which stood in front of the lowest 
fringe of timber, she stopped long enough to 
snuggle the newest settlement baby. Its mother 
greeted her eagerly with the news that they had 
named it Castoria. She had found the name on 
a bottle and thought it pretty. 

Nancy allowed that it was. " And it encour- 
ages such a breadth of selection. * Vanilla ' 
would be good, or * Tapioca.' ' 

Then up, up, up, she climbed among the 
timbered ledges, the dried leaves singing under- 
foot, the water oaks and gum trees rustling their 
brown leaves against her shoulders, the crisp, 
blue, friendly sky looking down into her face 
between the pillars of stark timber. By mid- 
morning the rises and dips of the trail brought 
her to where Betsy Jane Skidmore's house stood 
with one foot swung rakishly over the bluff of 
the gully. 

Betsy Jane exclaimed softly with delight when 
she saw her coming. Being an early riser, she 



228 Nancy the Joyous 

was just setting out her midday meal. As they 
two together spread out hoecake, molasses, but- 
termilk and dried beans cooked in lard, Nancy 
smiled to herself, rejoicing with a kind of deep- 
seated joy, as though it were a pleasant secret, 
that this was to be her Thanksgiving dinner. 
She had a knife and spoon to eat with ; Betsy had 
a fork and Timothy, the son, used his jackknife. 
It was not at all bad, except for the taste of 
raw lard in the beans. 

" And that's a mere trifle," thought Nancy ex- 
pansively. " All one has to do is to specialize 
on hoecake." 

They lingered long over the scrapings of 
molasses on their plates, for she and Betsy Jane 
had so many things close to their hearts to talk 
about. 

A rollicsome spirit filled Nancy Lynn that 
morning. She grasped her knife and spoon, one 
in each hand, like an unmannered three-year-old 
and beat a noisy tattoo up the table in the direc- 
tion of Betsy Jane. 

"This is Thanksgiving Day!" she cried 
jubilantly. 

"What's that?" 



Nancy the Joyous 229 

" It's a Yankee day, when we stop and count 
our blessings. What are your blessings, Betsy 
Jane?" 

"We-ell," deliberately, "I reckon that this 
here valley is the civilizest country of any to live 
in. You hear of shootin's and killin's all 'round. 
You can't have a newspaper read to you that you 
don't hear about 'em. But we haven't any sich 
goin's on. Folks is all alike 'round here. All we 
want is something to eat and something to wear. 
I'd like a good dress to put on but if I ain't got it, 
it don't worry me none. I tells myself you might 
just as well keep handy and happy with the Lord 
as to drag along 'cause of sich." 

Nancy's eyes glowed on her with appreciation. 

Betsy Jane warmed up to the subject of 
blessings. 

" And I hear Preacher MacDonald has a new 
call," she gossiped. 

"A fine, big one!" replied Nancy, who had 
secretly bespoken it from the Bishop. 

" He's a likely young exhorter but looks like 
he took a turn and this here climate didn't seem 
to agree with him." 

" No," agreed Nancy profoundly. " And now 



230 Nancy the Joyous 

listen, Betsy Jane, while I tell you my latest 
blessing! " 

She went on eagerly to relate how the Bishop 
had written her that he was going to send a friend 
of his in to visit her. " She can stay only a fort- 
night," he wrote, " but I think the companion- 
ship will do you good. She has just returned 
from abroad, where she has been studying music, 
and I suggested that she bring her violin in with 
her." 

" After Europe I don't know how I shall 
manage to entertain her; but it will be so cozy 
to have another girl facing me across the table. 
I grow so enthusiastic planning for her." 

" So that's why you are so happy to-day," 
said Betsy Jane Skidmore shrewdly. 

Nancy nodded her chin and beat two noisy lit- 
tle fists on the table again. 

" Yes, that's why I am so happy," she cried 
joyfully. 




S THE doctor rode along 
Swaggerty Valley in the 
windy dusk, the flare of 
Nancy's hearth shining 
through the windows 
beckoned him off his 
horse. In response to his 
knock, came the cheerful 
lilt of Nancy's voice. 
Inside he stopped short. There was the log- 
sided room whose every detail he knew by heart, 
the rag rugs, the few bright pictures pinned 
against the walls, the two blue platters on the 
hearth-shelf. That night he found there a 
strange young woman with a figure moulded 
in long, lithe, deliberate lines. Her poise was 
the expression of an unconsciously conscious 
feeling of her personal distinction. It sug- 
gested that she was in the midst of her 
surroundings but not of them, as a princess of 
the blood is trained to hold herself. 

The doctor from Salt Lick looked quickly 

231 



232 Nancy the Joyous 

around the room to make sure that it held for 
him Nancy's good comradeship. He found her 
buttoned up in a long apron, kneeling before 
the fireplace at some cooking. 

" Good evening, Sunnyside." That was his 
name for Nancy. 

She sprang to her feet, holding out a hand. 

" You'll have to take the left one. The 
other's smudgy." 

After he had been presented to Margaret 
Lincoln, they two stood looking down upon 
Nancy browning turnovers in a hearth baker. 
Nancy, with her head bent down, was secretly 
smiling with pride. She had never before seen 
the doctor in the role of a society man and she 
felt a sense of personal gratification in his ease 
and surety of manner. 

" He never did that for me," she thought with 
a chuckle not unlike her Aunt Crubb's. 

Miss Lincoln had one arm outstretched in a 
delicate curve, so that it rested by the merest 
touch of the fingertips upon the mantel. She 
bent slightly so as to follow Nancy's move- 
ments. 

A fireplace baker is made with three iron legs 



Nancy the Joyous 233 

so as to stand in a bed of hot embers drawn 
forward upon the hearth-rock. Its cover has a 

""* 

basin-like depression into which hot coals are 
shoveled from time to time so that it will get 
an even heat above and below. 

" It is like making mud pies," suggested Miss 
Lincoln, watching Nancy filling a fresh supply 
of embers into the cover. 

Nancy lifted a flushed face. 

" Yes," she agreed cordially, " only there's 
more responsibility and it's warmer," rubbing 
the back of her wrist across her forehead. 

" Here, let me lift that for you," said the 
doctor, reaching for the pothooks. 

He removed the cover and they bent their 
heads together and peered in. 

" Done." 

" Done." 

They two were versed in fireplace cooking. 

" How interesting," said Miss Lincoln. 

" They taste good," answered the doctor, 
hanging the pothooks back on their nail. 

But the meal that followed was not in all 
respects a success. Society life is made up of 
social rites, which are a passing good substitute 



234 Nancy the Joyous 

for the real thing life. The chance meals the 
doctor and Nancy had eaten together in that 
little room had been made gracious and orderly 
by a feeling of comradeship ; but by some strange 
alchemy Miss Lincoln managed to convert this 
dinner into a social rite. Every time Nancy 
lifted her teacup, she set it down gingerly lest it 
should rattle. And yet she had conceived a 
genuine admiration for the stranger. When 
Nancy was not waiting on her, she was covertly 
admiring her and her clothes. Simple as Miss 
Lincoln's dress was, it was a wonderful revela- 
tion of her figure and her personality. Nancy 
had forgotten that there were such clothes. 

Miss Lincoln and the doctor talked easily of 
Europe, where each had done considerable 
traveling. 

" But I have just come back from the East. I 
have been spending a little time in Japan." 

" Oh, did you go to China? " cried Nancy. 

" Yes. I had such interesting letters of 
introduction that I went over for a little while. 
The Bishop got them for me. I was surprised 
to find " here she turned her attention from 
the doctor to Nancy " what a man of influ- 



Nancy the Joyous 235 

ence, secular influence, the Bishop is. I had 
understood, of course, that he is widely known ; 
but I had always thought of him merely as an 
ecclesiastic. But I have been discovering that 
he has influence in educational affairs and in 
matters of state. He has a large circle of in- 
fluence in appointing young men to fill different 
positions. They tell me that he is extremely 
severe in his exactions. They say he recom- 
mends none but absolutely the right man for the 
right place and that when once he has used his 
influence for a young fellow he is really merci- 
less in the way he holds him up to standard. 
Ultimately, of course, it is best for the man and 
for progress in general." 

Nancy's cheeks flushed. It sounded like a 
criticism of her Bishop. 

" I have never found him exacting," she 
answered. 

' These gentle souls are apt to be severe," gen- 
eralized Miss Lincoln, dismissing that phase of 
the subject. 

She smiled upon Nancy with an extra touch 
of sweetness in her aloofness. 

" I am engaged to one of his cousins. That 



236 Nancy the Joyous 

is why he has taken such an interest in me." 

" You have my good wishes," answered Nancy 
genuinely. " Mine always follow where the 
Bishop's go." 

Miss Lincoln now turned to the doctor. She 
managed, somehow, to convey an impression of 
gentle reproof to Nancy, as though she felt that 
their conversation had grown over-personal and 
had excluded him. 

" I ran over to Japan to prepare for the 
coming season. I have my first engagement to 
sing in opera this winter a Japanese theme 
and I thought it well to go and get the local 
color." 

Miss Lincoln was too much of a woman of 
culture to say this egotistically. She was offer- 
ing it asr interesting conversation. She gave a 
quick sketch of the plot of the opera. 

' Would you like to get an idea of the music? " 
she asked graciously, rising and glancing 
towards her violin. While they two drew the 
table back against the wall, she tuned her instru- 
ment, fingering it lovingly. Nancy turned out 
the lights. Miss Lincoln fitted the violin under 
her chin and touched two or three first bird-notes 



Nancy the Joyous 237 

from it with her fingers. She moved dreamily 
towards the hearthside through the great rays 
of light and shadow which fanned across the 
ceiling and walls. Then the notes of her music 
began to rise through them, filling the room with 
the mingled beauties of sight and sound. Now 
and then she sang softly as she played. 

For an hour, as one wrapt, Nancy Lynn 
listened and looked. This young woman was a 
product of human culture, a generalization. 
Her form was corseted into lines that repre- 
sented a generalization of womanly beauty. 
The expression of her face was held in a gener- 
alized graciousness and repose. The very artis- 
tic emotions that floated upward on the wings of 
her music were generalizations of human experi- 
ence. For the time being Nancy lost sight of 
the fact that God, who stands beyond human 
culture, is a particularizer. She felt rustic 
in her individualized interest in Marget and 
Betsy Jane and Betsy Jane's son, Timothy. 

When the doctor rose to leave, Nancy fol- 
lowed him out into the dooryard. 

" Doctor-man," she said with a shake of the 
head, " you and Swaggerty and the good Bishop 



238 Nancy the Joyous 

have been making me vain; but I'm cured. I'm 
stubby and over-enthusiastic and I give instead 
of accepting. It isn't ladylike." 

The doctor took this for a joke and laughed. 

' Yes," she continued convincedly, " only this 
morning on the upper trail Mittie Jeems stopped 
me and said, ' Law, I don't see how you can stand 
it to comb your hair every day. It almost kills 
me to comb mine once a month.' I can look 
back now and see that I actually felt flattered. 
And just look at it!" she cried, rumpling it 
viciously under her two palms so that a mist of 
little curls came tumbling down around her face. 

She drew him forward a couple of steps so 
that he could look with her through the window 
at the girl within. 

" That's the way it ought to be done. I glory 
in her. If I were a man I'd be wild about her." 

" Would you? " he answered. " I wouldn't." 

The two girls left alone together, talked for 
an hour in the wavering firelight, seeking com- 
mon interests and reaching out tendrils of friend- 
liness. Then the fire had died down to a glow- 
ing bed of embers. While Miss Lincoln packed 
her violin back in its case, Nancy slipped into 



Nancy the Joyous 239 

the guest chamber to fold down the bed covers. 
There on the dressing table, amid a litter of 
toilet articles, stood the photographs of two men 
the Bishop and John Carter. 




My dear Bishop, 

You could not help it, either of you I know 
that because she is lovely. I don't blame you ; 
Oh, I don't! But why didn't you tell me before 
you sent her in? 

I am going to run away from Swaggerty. It 
is cowardly, but I don't care. I guess I've used 
up all my pluck. 

I 

How would I have hindered his progress more 
than she? And why haven't you told me that you 
are the Crusty Old Person? 

I played you a square game. 

Nancy Lynn. 



240 




HY, what is the matter?" 
exclaimed the doctor a 
couple of mornings later 
when he stopped for a 
few minutes in Swag- 
gerty Valley. 

He closed a lean 
brown hand over Nancy's 
wrist and drew her off 
into the sunshine at the side of the house. 
" Now tell me all about it." 
The sunshine was clear, unfriendly and piti- 
lessly revealing. It poked its fingers along the 
clay daubed in between the logs of the house- 
walls, hunting for places where the mud had 
begun to fall out in ragged chunks. It threw a 
searchlight on the hard-baked earth of the door- 
yard, bald of any single spear of grass. It 
showed where the chickens had scratched for 
worms and where they had burrowed holes in the 
yard in which to dust and sun themselves. 
" Now tell me all about it." 

241 



242 Nancy the Joyous 

" I'm jealous," whispered Nancy huskily. 
" She's stolen my bishop and my diplomat." 

" There is a bishop, of course; but do you 
really mean there is a " 

Nancy's eyes welled full of tears. 

Brusque man as he was, work among his sick 
had taught him the tenderness of a woman. The 
doctor took Nancy's face between his two hands 
comfortingly, as though she might have been a 
child ; but as he looked down into it, gradually his 
own grew tense. He bent and kissed her once on 
the hair just above the line of the forehead. 

The doctor's practice was shamelessly neg- 
lected the fortnight following. He brought over 
one of his saddle horses and left it in Swaggerty 
for Miss Lincoln's use. They spent hours 
together in a sheltered nook in the bottom land 
where the creek flows through the settlement. 
Here she brought her violin and played for him. 
Swaggerty watched with an interest, not alto- 
gether approving. 

" The doctor seems to have taken a loving for 
the foreign woman," they commented, " and we 
all thought he had fixed his heart on Miss 
Nancy." 



Nancy the Joyous 243 

In this way Miss Lincoln was in the cabin with 
Nancy only long enough to eat and sleep; and 
at last a morning dawned when the doctor drove 
her out of the valley to the railroad. 

Then Nancy dragged out her trunk and began 
taking her pictures down from the walls. It 
was slow work, for she moved listlessly. She 
made innumerable journeys from her book- 
shelves, her dressing table, her clothespress, to 
the open trunk. Sometimes she seated herself 
on the edge of it, wondering where to go with it 
when finally she had it packed. Evening found 
her still at her task. 

Then Betsy Jane Skidmore came bustling 
excitedly in with the news that Marget's boy was 
dying; so Nancy left everything and went. 

She found the dusky little cabin blurred with 
awe-struck faces and stifling with the odor of 
human bodies. For the first time since she had 
been in the mountains her whole soul revolted. 

They had the little fellow terrified. Oh, why 
do people make things that cannot possibly be 
helped, harder than they have to be! She made 
them all move back against the walls and knelt 
down by the bedside, lifting the little fellow into 



244 Nancy the Joyous 

her arms. She could not have said to him the 
solemn things they wanted of her. His was 
only a little bud of a soul and she could not pry 
it open with her fingers. So she told him in 
whispers about Boy Blue and Bo-peep and about 
the sleepy sheep that come over the hill, over the 
hill. One by one they watched them over the 
brow and down the slope until he raised himself 
with a little shudder and fell back dead in her 
arms. 

Nancy would not have lost control of herself 
if she had not been so very tired. Then, too, the 
Bishop had hurt more deeply than she knew. 
With her arms stretched out across that little 
dead baby she sobbed aloud. She could hear the 
people shuffle back from her against the wall, 
whispering. She cried and cried until she felt 
that her heart broke. After that one doesn't 
cry. When she staggered to her feet it was all 
different. She had let go her hold on every 
dream she had ever dreamed since first she 
hugged a doll up in her arms. As she stumbled 
across the room with her hands held out to 
Marget, the mother, it did not seem to matter 
much where she went or where she stayed. 




My dear Bishop, 

I am sorry I was rude to you. You did play 
square. 

At first when I discovered that you are the 
one who forced me to give him up, it made my 
hands unsteady and my head dizzy to think that 
you would hurt me so. But now I can look at 
it as a bargain and see that you have kept your 
half of it. And I give you my word of honor 
that I have never once failed to keep mine. 

When I think of you and these last days I 
think of you most all day long my heart gets 
shouting up at me that you were honest in it, 
until I say, " Yes, yes, I know it. Only do keep 
quiet." It may even be that you did not know it 
was I, for I wrote only to your secretary. Per- 
haps he thought I was just a high-tempered girl 

245 



246 Nancy the Joyous 

and spared you from hearing about my letter. I 
know I should have saved you all I could. 

I'm not going to run away. I'm going to stay 
right on in Swaggerty. They are so good to me 
in here. 

Annie Lynn. 




HE settlement that lies up 
in the far pocket of the 
mountain sent a hurried 
rider down to Nancy 
Lynn with word that a 
tree had fallen on Mittie 
Jeems' husband while he 
was out logging; so she 
saddled Wings at once 
and started on the long climb over the ridge. 

On her way down again the darkness over- 
took her; but she and Wings rode on through 
it, trusting to their homing instinct to guide 
them. But when she found Wings standing 
nose to nose with a cliff she realized that they 
had strayed off the trail into the timber. She 
did not dare press on through the blackness, for 
Wings was such a sentimental old mule with a 
fondness for hanging musingly over the edge 
of precipices. As the snakes were numerous 
that season, the only thing for Nancy Lynn to 
do was to hitch Wings and climb into the 

247 



248 Nancy the Joyous 

branches of a tree to spend the night. She made 
herself as comfortable as possible with her back 
against the big trunk and her hair coiled around 
her throat for warmth. It was not so cramping 
along at first; but as hours wore on she decided 
with a wry smile that as a matter of practical 
details, the life of a bird is not all that poets 
sing it. A host of unused muscles began to feel 
sore from the long strain of balancing herself. 

Through the all-enveloping darkness she 
heard over the crest of the hill on its opposite 
slope, the cries of men's voices and the yelping 
of dogs, so distant that the sounds came to her 
thin and sweet. It may be that Nancy Lynn 
dropped off into a doze, for the next thing she 
knew they had topped the ridge directly above 
her and she caught the snap of undergrowth and 
the yip of dogs pottering around on false trails. 

Then a hound began to whimper and cry. 
Nancy knew the meaning of that as well as did 
the dogs. It was the alarm signal of a fresh 
scent. Its effect was instant and electric. The 
hounds bunched and then scattered, heads down, 
through the underbrush. Instantly the night 
was filled with frenzied music, the cries of men, 



Nancy the Joyous 249 

the half-wail, half-yelp of dogs. Down the 
ridge they came straight for Nancy Lynn. She 
drew her skirts up about her and peered down 
into the blackness below her, which had now 
become a circle of clamoring yelps. As a torch 
drew near, her eyes picked out of the dark a 
ring of open red mouths baying up at her excit- 
edly. Then someone thrust a torch up into the 
branches to see the opossum they had treed. 

"Why, it's Miss "Nancy! Law, Miss 
Nancy! " they shouted. 

But Nancy Lynn saw only one face among 
them. She blinked hard, suddenly afraid that 
she had become a vision-seeing saint. The next 
minute she slipped down out of the branches 
into the arms of her dream and found them very 
real. 

" John Carter! " she cried. 

It was inconsiderate of the hounds to hit 
another scent at that particular minute, for the 
mountaineers were torn between two centers of 
interest. But the urgent barking of the pack 
won out and they two were left with only a four- 
teen-year-old standing open-mouthed under a 
torch. 



250 Nancy the Joyous 

Her cheek was pressed against his ; they spoke 
with their lips close together. 

" And you cared all the time, Nancy? " 

"I've hungered and thirsted for you," she 
whispered. 

"But you told me " 

' That I wanted to wear silk stockings," with 
a sobbing laugh. " Oh, had they only let me, I 
would have followed you barefoot over the 
rocks." 

He drew her forward into the circle of torch- 
light where he could scan each dear, remembered 
feature. 

" They're still just as blue." 

" But what brought you in here? " 

" You." 

Then he began to explain in his thorough 
way. 

" I came out to try to get hold of some maps 
of Tibet. We have got to get maps of the 
country. France has some and Germany; and 
Sweden has nearly a thousand sheets of survey. 
Then, of course, when I was as near as Sweden, 
I ran over to the States. But it was really due 
to a friend of mine over at Salt Lick. He wrote 



Nancy the Joyous 251 

the Bishop there was some misunderstanding 
that was wearing on you. You had said some- 
thing about a secretary and the Bishop got the 
story from him. And there was I, already on 
my way home. I came through with the hunters 
so as not to lose an hour's time in reaching you." 

" The doctor! " murmured Nancy. 

" As fine a man as walks the earth! " 

The note of hearty, untroubled friendship in 
which these words were spoken told her that 
neither Carter nor the Bishop had detected the 
doctor's sacrifice. It was not Nancy Lynn's 
right to break the man's silence. So this much 
at least life gave these two to share alone 
together. Nancy drew away and stared into 
the darkness in the direction of the lonely man 
among his books and drugs at Salt Lick. 

" Greater love hath no man than this, that he 
lay down his life " she whispered to herself. 
" Oh, before I leave, I must go to him and tell 
him that I understand; that I, myself, know 
what that means." 

" I have some good news to take Doc," con- 
tinued Carter, drawing her back to him. " Mrs. 
Crubb and Mr. Williams are planning to build 



252 Nancy the Joyous 

a hospital in here and endow it. There are to 
be two nurses, one for the ward and one to go 
around among the cabins. They have been 
planning it out with Miss Schuyler." 

The small boy under the torch wished they 
wouldn't get together that way and whisper. 

" And I thought you were going to marry 

Miss Lincoln," murmured Nancy contentedly. 
i 

" But she's engaged to my cousin, Arnold 
Carter. I sent that photograph to Arnold by 
Margaret and she kept it around because she 
thought it looked like him." 

The small boy could restrain himself no 
longer. 

" Where y'u goin', Miss Nancy? " 

Nancy turned with a quick gasp of surprise. 

"Oh!" she said, "I'm going to Tibet for 
awhile, I suppose. It really doesn't matter 
where." 

Just then the figures of the hunters loomed out 
of the darkness. Against the black wall of the 
night they stood in a friendly, curious circle. 
The dogs nosed a way in between them and lay 
down on the ground at Nancy's feet, with 
tongues lolling out. 



Nancy the Joyous 253 

" Be y'u goin' away from us, Miss Nancy? " 
asked one of them. 

Nancy Lynn looked around upon the ring of 
mountaineers with a warmth of genuine friend- 
ship. She stood lithely straight like a gypsy in 
the flare of the torch. Deep in her eyes lay a 
subtle something all her own that beckoned to 
men, luring them on like an adventure, to the 
fresh, glad joys of living. 

" Yes," she answered. " My feet are in the 
trail again; only now it is just a long, straight 
path leading across the world to the sunset." 



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